The quest for hegemony and class struggle during the first elections to the Catalan Parliament in 1980

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyse the first elections to the Catalan Parliament of 1980 to try to grasp their relevance and the historic evolution that they enabled for both the political system and the dominant logics within the Catalan political forces. From a perspective that under­stands the political as a dispute for hegemony in the Gramscian sense, also understanding class dynamics as a relevant element in understanding the political, the analysis focuses on the terms in which the political dispute occurred during that election, studying its main actors, the evolution of its approaches and the reasons for those, and the variations and shifts in the correlation of forces between them, taking into account also the general con­ditions arising from the context in which the whole process occurred. The aim is also to contribute to a political history of the consolidation of the democratic system in Spain and the crisis and relaunching of global capi­talism during the 1970s and 1980s from Catalonia