1987 vote of no confidence in the government of Felipe González


A motion of no confidence in the Spanish government of Felipe González was debated and voted in the Congress of Deputies between 26 and 30 March 1987. It was brought by People's Alliance leader Antonio Hernández Mancha, motivated on the "deteriorating situation of the country" as a result of the social conflict sparked throughout the 1986–87 winter. However, the motion's true motives were attributed to Mancha's need for public promotion as both AP and opposition leader after his recent election to the post, as well as to his party's perceived urge to vindicate its primacy within the centre-right political spectrum in Spain amid the internal crisis that had been beleaguering it in the previous months.
It was soundly defeated, never having had any real prospects of succeeding as a result of the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers' Party commanding an absolute majority of seats in the Congress. It secured the support of only AP and Valencian Union —67 votes at the time—and the opposition of the PSOE, United Left, the Basque Nationalist Party, Basque Country Left and Canarian Independent Groups —194 votes—with most other parties abstaining and many deputies not attending the vote at all. Having been unable to secure any significant support outside of his group, harshly criticized by other opposition parties and seeing some notorious gaffes during his speech, political commentators promptly came to regard the motion as a huge political blow for Hernández Mancha's career, who ultimately ended up retiring from politics in 1989.

Background

The conservative People's Coalition had broken up following disappointing results in the 1986 Spanish general election: first with the splitting of the People's Democratic Party in July 1986, then with the Liberal Party following suit in January 1987. Dissensions within the People's Alliance had also seen the splitting of Jorge Verstrynge and Carlos Manglano in October to form the Democratic Renewal party, and of Gabriel Camuñas and Carlos Ruiz Soto into the Democratic Party in December.
Concurrently, following the electoral defeat in the Basque regional election held in November that same year, Manuel Fraga resigned as AP leader on 1 December, being replaced by Antonio Hernández Mancha—until then the leader of the party in Andalusia—on 7 February. However, by the time of Mancha's election his party's parliamentary group in the Congress of Deputies had been reduced to 67 members out of the 105 that the People's Coalition had secured in the 1986 election. Coupled to this was the fact that Hernández Mancha was not a deputy himself but a senator—preventing him, among other things, from engaging Felipe González directly in the State of the Nation Debate of 1987—meaning that he was having difficulties in reaching out to the general public as leader of the opposition. Finally, Fraga's resignation had prompted former prime minister Adolfo Suárez and his Democratic and Social Centre party to attempt an electoral expansion at the expense of AP in the upcoming 1987 local, regional and European Parliament elections, ultimately envisaging the former overcoming the latter as the main opposition party in Spain.

Legal provisions

The Spanish Constitution of 1978 required for motions of no confidence to be proposed by at least one-tenth of the Congress of Deputies—35 out of 350. Following the German model, votes of no confidence in Spain were constructive, so the motion was required to include an alternative candidate for prime minister. For a motion of no confidence to be successful, it had to be passed by an absolute majority in the Congress of Deputies. A minimum period of five days from the motion's registration was required to pass before it could come up for a vote, but no maximum was established. Other parties were entitled to submit alternative motions within the first two days from the registration.
Concurrently, the Prime Minister was barred from dissolving the Cortes Generales and calling a general election while a motion of no confidence was pending. If the motion was successful, the incumbent prime minister and his/her government were required to submit their resignation to the Monarch, while the candidate proposed in the motion was automatically considered to have the confidence of the Congress of Deputies and immediately appointed as prime minister. If unsuccessful, the signatories of the motion were barred from submitting another during the same session.
The procedure for motions of no confidence was regulated within Articles 175 to 179 of the Standing Orders of the Congress of Deputies, which provided for the debate on the motion starting with its defence by one of the signatory members without any time limitations, to be followed by an also time-unlimited speech by the nominated candidate to explain his/her political programme. Subsequently, spokespeople from the different parliamentary groups in Congress were allowed to speak for thirty minutes, with an opportunity to reply or rectify themselves for ten minutes. Members of the government were allowed to take the floor and speak at any time of their request during the debate.

Opinion polls

Events

Prelude and debate

The motion was officially registered on 23 March 1987 by fifty-one People's Alliance deputies and with Antonio Hernández Mancha as the proposed candidate, based on the following six motives: "poor functioning of state services", "ineffective economic management", "ineffectiveness and inadequacy of the Central Administration", "erratic foreign and defense policy", "hegemonic and interventionist attitude of the State" and "absence of proper channels for dialogue with social movements"; the latter was attributed to the ongoing social conflict between González's government and trade unions—including the Workers' General Union —since the end of 1986 and into the spring of 1987. The initiative was criticized by several parties, including the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, because of the motion's mathematical impossibility of succeeding as a result of the latter commanding an absolute majority in the Congress of Deputies, while also being dubbed as an opportunistic exercise of political self-promotion because of the close proximity of the 1987 local and regional elections.
The debate's schedule was set for 26–27 March, whereas the vote itself was not expected to take place until after the weekend, on 30 March, in order to respect the five-day timetable set down by the Constitution. This was the first and—to date—only time that the vote on a motion of no confidence in Spain would not be held immediately after the debate. AP's spokesperson in Congress Juan Ramón Calero had advocated for the debate to be postponed to next week so as not to interrupt the "unity of act" between the debate and the vote, but the government pushed through its own schedule thanks to its parliamentary majority. This led Calero to claim that this had been done "so as to cast off the feeling of censorship that our initiative implies", but he reluctantly accepted it so as to not give the impression that Hernández Mancha needed more time for preparation. The CDS, the PDP, United Left and the Regionalist Aragonese Party supported the view that the debate and the vote should respect the unity of act of the parliamentary meeting, whereas Convergence and Union had been favourable to the debate being held as early as possible, with the latter stance being the one that prevailed.
In his defense of the motion previous to Mancha's speech as candidate on 26 March, Calero argued on the motion's motives that "in the case of a single-party with an absolute majority in the chamber, the motion of no confidence fulfills other subsidiary purposes which were the ones aimed for by this group what we were trying to show with this motion was the Government's inability to deal with the serious problems facing our country". After laying out his programme, Hernández Mancha was received with widespread criticism from other parties: those in opposition condemned AP's attitude of not having reached out to them previously to ask for their support to the motion, whereas González's government remained mostly silent in the first day of debate—except for the formal reply to the speeches by Calero and Mancha, which was borne to deputy prime minister Alfonso Guerra—allegedly "out of respect for the other spokespeople", but in reality because of considering that the one being examined was Hernández Mancha and not themselves. In his reply, Guerra mocked Mancha by dubbing his speech as "the discourse of the old, reactionary right, clothed in populism".
In the second day of debate, Prime Minister Felipe González took the floor to disapprove of Mancha's performance and criticize his alleged contradictions, the "lack of consistency" of his programme and "the insufficient information" that he had collected on the issues addressed in his speeches. The replies from AP's leader were notorious because of a number of gaffes: a first one in which he erroneusly claimed that then-foreign minister Francisco Fernández Ordóñez had been a cabinet member under Adolfo Suárez during the censure motion of May 1980—Fernández Ordóñez had not been appointed to the cabinet until September that year—and another one when he mistakenly attributed to Saint Teresa of Jesus a quote from Lope de Vega when addressing the CDS parliamentary group and Suárez himself, which forced the latter—who had initially rejected to participate in the debate—to take the floor himself to refute it, as well as to reject the alleged political motivation of the motion.
The motion was defeated by an overwhelming margin, with just 67 votes in favour—those of AP and Valencian Union —194 against and 71 abstentions, with 18 absentees. Several of the opposition parties were in disagreement with the government's policy and González's management of the country, but their level of disatisfaction was not such so as to openly support Mancha's investiture as alternative prime minister, prompting many of these parties to abstain instead. The supportive stance of UV's only member in Congress also led to discomfort setting among the more moderate and centrist sectors within the party, which had unsuccessfully advocated for an abstention in the vote. The refusal of the PDP and PL to support the motion—the latter of which had taken the decision that same day, on the grounds that it had been tabled untimely and unilaterally—prompted a AP to break up all relations with these two parties in the short term.

Vote

Aftermath

regarded the motion and the vote as a success in "consolidating as the sole alternative of government", even not ruling out the tabling of future, similar motions in each parliamentary session. However, the opportunity of it, Mancha's lackluster performance in the debate and his oversized defeat—including the refusal from AP's erstwhile allies or that of its split members to back him—would go down in history as a massive political blunder that, ultimately, would cost him his political career.
Among the factors said to contribute to Hernández Mancha's failing to secure any political gain from the debate were that he was a newcomer to national politics—having been appointed as AP leader barely two months earlier—the fact that the ruling PSOE rushed the debate on the motion to the earliest possible date allowed under law, leading to the well-experienced Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra to—in the words of some media—"toy" with him, and that the prime minister himself chose to not intervene until the second day of debating, leaving Mancha isolated and his speech exposed to the panning of other parties while depriving him of the parliamentary duel he sought. From that point, movements were set in motion within his party to replace him as leader, ultimately seeing Manuel Fraga forcing him out of politics in January 1989 and prompting the refoundation of AP—together with the PDP and PL—into the People's Party that same month.
However, another of the interpretations on the motion's consequences was that it was partly successful in allowing AP to recover the political initiative ahead of the June 1987 local and regional elections, where the party held out as the main opposition force in Spain despite the electoral growth of the CDS. Later on, Hernández Mancha would reveal that he had not tabled the motion against González, but against Suárez, weary that the right-wing electorate could succumb to tactical voting in favour of the latter—much more widely known and popular than himself—as a result of the political vacuum left by Fraga's resignation. In any case, the 1987 motion has come to go down in the recent history of Spain in contraposition to the 1980 one, as the exemplification of the political risks than an ill-fated vote of no confidence can entail for the candidate tabling it.