13 SPAIN’S “SECOND TRANSITION”: PATTERNS OF STABILITY AND CHANGE IN THE SPANISH DEMOCRACY 2008-2017 Adriaan Ph. V. Kühn 1. INTRODUCTION Calls for a “Second Transition” have been ubiquitous in both the political and media debate in present-day Spain. Against the backdrop of an economic crisis, sky-high unemployment and citizens’ trust in political institutions at rock bottom, the Spanish democracy indeed has faced severe challenges on several fronts. Amidst growing civic disdain for an allegedly unaccountable political class, fueled by corruption scandals affecting virtually all major political parties, together with the subsequent rise of the leftist Podemos party in the 2014 European and 2015 regional elections, many expected – sooner rather than later – the established party system to collapse. Others claimed that the winds of change would not stop blowing just at the steps of parliament. From their perspective, even the wider power arrangements put in place by Spain’s transición – the process of democratic reform after dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975 – were challenged by a “growing critique of the imbalances in our model of economic growth, the problems of social development, the limits of democracy, dysfunctional institutions and the State of Autonomies’ asymmetries” (Sánchez Estévez, 2015, p. 3421). The latter issue made the front pages in October 2017, when the regional government of Catalonia tested its counterpart in Madrid with an independence referendum that the Spanish constitutional court had declared illegal. The effects of the (economic) crisis, so it seemed, even put Spain’s territorial integrity at stake. Labor relations proved to be tense as well: In 2012, and for the first time in the history of the parliamentary monarchy, Spain’s trade unions called for two general strikes within only six months to protest the austerity measures imposed by the government. In the same year, the country’s youth, labelled “the lost generation” by the media due to a 50 percent unemployment rate for those under the age Libro_Protest_on_the_Rise.indb 13 21/11/18 17:50