{"id":801923,"date":"2026-10-14T03:40:17","date_gmt":"2026-10-14T03:40:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/801923\/"},"modified":"2026-10-14T03:40:17","modified_gmt":"2026-10-14T03:40:17","slug":"miriam-gonzalez-durantez-launches-new-centrist-party-in-spain-spain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/801923\/","title":{"rendered":"Miriam Gonz\u00e1lez Dur\u00e1ntez launches new centrist party in Spain | Spain"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Spanish lawyer Miriam Gonz\u00e1lez Dur\u00e1ntez has launched<\/a> a new liberal, centrist party, vowing to clean up politics and give voters an alternative to the dominant socialist and conservative parties as the country gears up for next month\u2019s snap general election<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Gonz\u00e1lez Dur\u00e1ntez, an ex-EU adviser who is married to the former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, says her new party, Democracia21<\/a>, will offer a modern, transparent kind of politics that \u201cdoesn\u2019t feed on fear, insults or nostalgia\u201d.<\/p>\n

Democracia21\u2019s manifesto accuses both the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers\u2019 party (PSOE) and the rightwing People\u2019s party (PP) of squandering decades of government for short-term political ends.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the meantime: housing became unaffordable, young people left, bureaucracy grew like a religion, and bickering took the place of governing,\u201d it says. \u201cOld-school politics turned every problem into a narrative \u2013 and every solution into an electoral threat.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nick Clegg (centre) and Gonz\u00e1lez Dur\u00e1ntez at a campaign event in Sheffield in 2015. Photograph: Jon Super\/AP<\/p>\n

Mindful of the corruption scandals that eventually toppled the last PP government<\/a> \u2013 and the graft allegations enveloping the administration and inner circle<\/a> of the socialist prime minister, Pedro S\u00e1nchez \u2013 the new party is promising \u201ca radical political cleanup\u201d, including far greater transparency for parties.<\/p>\n

Gonz\u00e1lez Dur\u00e1ntez, who announced that Democracia21 will run in Madrid and Barcelona in the election on 29 November, has also positioned herself on two of the biggest issues facing voters: the housing crisis and immigration.<\/p>\n

The eviction last month<\/a> of an 87-year-old woman in Madrid unleashed waves of demonstrations<\/a> across Spain, led to the setting up of a protest camp in the centre of the capital and prompted S\u00e1nchez\u2019s minority government to propose emergency measures to try to make the rental market more equitable. When those measures were voted down by rightwing and far-right parties at the beginning of October, the prime minister announced a snap general election<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Speaking at her party\u2019s launch over the weekend, Gonz\u00e1lez Dur\u00e1ntez accused both the PSOE and the PP of ignoring the housing crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne lot has been in government for eight years and the other controls 80% of Spain\u2019s regional governments,\u201d she said. \u201cWhat\u2019s going on here is that they only remember about housing when an election comes around and all the people are on the streets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gonz\u00e1lez Dur\u00e1ntez proposed scrapping housing taxes for people under 35, and argued that a young person earning \u20ac1,300 (\u00a31,098) a month should not be paying more than \u20ac350 a month in rent.<\/p>\n

She also defended the benefits of controlled immigration and of Spain\u2019s place within the European project, which she described as \u201cabsolutely existential\u201d for the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cImmigration is an asset and an essential competitive advantage for Spain right now,\u201d she said. \u201cWe need to get rid of all the xenophobic talk but the state needs to be in control of immigration. We need to decide who comes in; how they come in; when they come in and, if they have to leave, we will also decide when they leave. None of this is contradictory. We need to do all that while ensuring that Europe doesn\u2019t fall into the traps of those political forces that haven\u2019t come to reform Europe, but to break it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Democracia21 is not the first centrist party to have tried to shake up the traditional socialist and conservative duopoly. The liberal Ciudadanos party, founded in 2006, briefly looked set to push past both the PSOE and the PP, but its decision to lurch to the right and its refusal to back the no-confidence motion<\/a> that turfed the conservatives out of office in 2018 proved fatal. Ciudadanos\u2019s support was so depleted by the last general election in July 2023 that it chose not to take part in the poll<\/a>.<\/p>\n

S\u00e1nchez\u2019s decision to call the snap election is another gamble from Spain\u2019s pragmatic and unpredictable prime minister. Polls suggest the PP will comfortably beat the PSOE to win first place, but is unlikely to secure an absolute majority, forcing it to rely on Vox\u2019s support to govern.<\/p>\n

S\u00e1nchez, meanwhile, will be hoping that the PP\u2019s decision to side with Vox and the rightwing Catalan pro-independence Junts party to torpedo the housing proposals will mobilise leftwing and moderate voters.<\/p>\n

The prime minister, however, is already facing an electoral setback after Spain\u2019s supreme court decided to maintain its suspension<\/a> of the voting rights of tens of thousands of overseas voters who benefited from a law his government introduced in 2022 offering Spanish citizenship to the descendants of those exiled during the civil war and subsequent Franco dictatorship.<\/p>\n

The move has angered the PP and Vox, who have accused S\u00e1nchez of seeking to create more socialist voters beyond Spain\u2019s borders. Although the suspension looks set to remain in place for the election, the court has said its ruling will not affect those who can prove that their parents or grandparents \u201csuffered exile for political or ideological reasons, or for reasons of belief or sexual orientation\u201d.<\/p>\n

The PSOE has denounced the political pressure behind the decision as an affront to democracy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe grandchildren of the Franco regime will be able to vote, but not those of the exiles, just as the PP and Vox wanted,\u201d the party\u2019s organisational secretary, Rebeca Torr\u00f3, posted on X<\/a>. \u201cTheir fascist agenda has struck at the cornerstone of democracy: the right to vote. We will not stop denouncing this outrage.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Spanish lawyer Miriam Gonz\u00e1lez Dur\u00e1ntez has launched a new liberal, centrist party, vowing to clean up politics…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":801924,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-801923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=801923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801923\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/801924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=801923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=801923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=801923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}