Spain's December election and the state of the Spanish center-left

Conn Hallinan wrote in December about what he learned from the elections in Spain: Spanish Elections Offer Another Lesson for the Left Foreign Policy in Focus 12/20/2018.

In that election, "The Dec. 2 vote saw the center-left Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) lose 14 seats in the regional parliament and the leftist alliance, Adelante Andalucía, drop three." The big winner in terms of improved vote percentages was the far-right Vox party.

Comparing trends in Spain to those in Grmany, he emphasizes that the center-right is losing support. But he is more concerned about the weakening of the center-left, largely due to their embrace of neoliberal austerity policies after the so-called End Of History:

What’s similar [between Spain and Germany] is the anger at the conventional center-right and center-left parties that have enforced a decade of misery on their populations. Center-left parties like the Democratic Party in Italy and the Social Democratic Party in Germany bought into the failed strategy of neo-liberalism that called for austerity, regressive taxes, privatization of public resources, and painful cutbacks in social services as a strategy for getting out of debt. [my emphasis]

And he describes this important move by the PSOE that was unpopular with the PSOE's base:

After ousting [Previous Party General Secretary Pedro] Sanchez, [the more conservative PSOE leader Susana] Diaz allowed the conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy [of the Partido Popular {PP}] to form a government and pass an austerity budget. Making common cause with the PP was apparently too much for the SPOE’s rank and file, and they returned Sanchez to his old post seven months later. The Socialist rank and file also seems to have sat on their hands in the Andalucian election. Only 58.6 percent of the electorate turned out, and there were a considerable number of abstentions and blank ballots in traditionally Socialist strongholds. [my emphasis]

The neoliberal austerity dream of the 1990s turned out to be more of a dystopia for large parts of the public, in Europe and the United States and pretty much everywhere else it was applied. But the wealthies got a lot richer, so there's that.