Spain's Third Republic drifts further away: no referendum, no PSOE, no alternative

The Third Republic, the PSOE and a referendum nobody dares to call

Spain's Third Republic will not come out of a referendum, and not because nobody is asking for one: the request has already been made, but the only actor capable of pushing it forward is precisely the one with the most reasons not to. The debate resurfaces every so often, and this time it has crept into the economics section as a settling of scores with the regime inherited from 1978.

The republican who would vote holding his nose

There are those who see Pedro Sánchez as the "first president of the Third Republic" and admit they would vote for the PSOE "holding their nose" if it meant closing the monarchical era. Against that current, others argue that the PSOE disqualifies any republican project: the governing party, they say, was itself responsible against the Second Republic for episodes described as a coup d'état in 1934 and electoral fraud in 1936. A Third Republic run by such people would, in this reading, be an "R78 2.0", a regime where you could still steal even more without any consequence.

The referendum the Constitution does not provide for

The third position does not even get into the substance: it points out that the constitutional framework makes no provision for a vote on the head of state. "A referendum? But is this a democracy?" sums up those who consider the very question a fiction. And in the background, there are those who propose stepping outside the monarchy/republic binary: options "more economical" for the population that never get spelled out.

The most likely outcome is that the Third Republic remains a term of political agitation rather than a governing programme. If the PSOE ever took that step, it would have to explain why it would have republican credibility this time around. It does not look inclined to. But in politics, twenty-first-century no-confidence motions also seemed impossible, and they peine.