Autochthonism, MORE and the vote based on the census
The sixty members of MÉS per Mallorca who met in assembly recently decided by majority vote to remain within Sumar. This cannot be considered a surprise. Nor was it a surprise, five months earlier, that MÉS per Mallorca managed to move forward when the leadership was inclined to split, as its namesake party in Menorca had also decided.
The situation of the Mallorcan neighborhoods cannot be compared. Menorca is much smaller, and the electoral phenomenon that decisively shapes the strategic decisions of all parties, and especially those focused on local issues—nationalists, sovereignists, insularists, and regionalists—is not as noticeable as in Mallorca: the vote based on the census. Although it is almost never analyzed publicly, it provides essential information for analysis: the capacity for social penetration of each political project.
Before continuing, a reminder is in order. The progressive wing of the Mallorcan nationalist movement, primarily represented by the PSM (1977-2010), debated from its very inception—incidentally, February will mark half a century since the founding of the seminal PSI—which of the two ideological axes should prevail: the left-right divide or the national one. This was not merely a matter of political philosophy. Strategic alliances depended on this decision. If the first axis carried more weight, support for the PSOE would always end up being the norm, no matter how much its actions, words, or positions might annoy or even irritate. If, on the other hand, the second axis proved more important, it meant prioritizing the distinct national idea over the interests of the parties of the Spanish nation, from which—as is common sense—the nationalist seeks liberation or, at the very least—in the case of Mallorca—to wrest more autonomy. Therefore, support for the PSOE or the PP would be the norm.
It hardly needs saying which axis triumphed. So much so that the PSM adopted a more leftist brand: MÁS. And the process has only intensified since then, culminating in the decision in June when the leadership saw that the desire to remain linked to the PSOE, without leaving Sumar, had spread among the rank and file more than they had anticipated. The leadership's adaptation was a matter of – little – time, and indeed, the firmness of the decision to leave Yolanda Díaz's group lasted about as long as other announcements of standing up to the Socialists.
Why these kinds of decisions? The answer lies in the analysis of the vote based on the census, which indicates social penetration regardless of the context of each election, the results based on valid votes, and the distribution of seats on each occasion. It's of little or no use if you only analyze one or two elections... but if you have a sufficiently long historical series and group all the candidates by ideological blocs—for example, autochthonous and national—the information it provides is essential for understanding many political decisions, such as those of MÁS.
A detailed quantitative analysis of electoral behavior based on the census is not possible within the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that in 1983, the autochthonous parties—PSM, UM, CIM, etc.—accounted for 15.3% of the Balearic voters. In 2023—both MÁS, El Pi, and even smaller parties—this figure was 7.9%. The decrease was 7.4 percentage points. That is, a loss of 48.36% compared to forty-two years ago. Almost half less social penetration.
The phenomenon, of course, also affects insularism-regionalism—UM, El Pi...—which is in a much worse position than MÁS, but for the latter—which is the subject of this article—the declining voter turnout explains some of the decisions it has made.
Social and electoral change is so hostile to the nationalism-Spanishness axis that the PSM once found itself facing the evidence that it had increasingly less social penetration, and the left-right dialectic prevailed as a reaction. The result has been that today MÁS, like the PCE-EU-Sumar and Podemos, is a party that, whatever it says, always demonstrates its membership in the Spanish left-wing space led by the PSOE.
The PSM's decision to transform itself was, if not a matter of mere survival—which it wasn't yet—then certainly a necessary response to the evident decline clearly demonstrated by the voter turnout: it was losing more and more ground in society. So the party had no choice but to decide between staying the same or reinventing itself.
Then—from 2007 to 2013—with the addition of the red branding inherited from the old Spanish communism, along with a pale green veneer, it was reborn as MÉS, a primarily leftist formation whose leadership is now at the center of it all.
