2023-07-24 05:56:19
Pedro Sanchez, outgoing Spanish Prime Minister and candidate of the Socialist Party (PSOE), greets his supporters after the legislative elections, in Madrid, on July 23, 2023. JAVIER SORIANO / AFP
The early Spanish legislative elections on Sunday July 23 offered a bitter victory to the Popular Party (PP, right), represented by the Galician Alberto Nuñez Feijoo, because it proved insufficient for it to wrest power from the left. Conversely, the defeat of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), led by Pedro Sanchez, is relative, and its result, jubilant to see the scenes of jubilation in front of the party’s headquarters in Madrid, could be enough for it to obtain more support than rejections in a hypothetical investiture vote. The most probable, however, still remains that the results of the Spanish elections, which took all the analysts on the wrong foot, lead to the blocking of Parliament and an ungovernable country. And so to new elections.
With 33% of the vote and 136 seats in Parliament (out of 350), the PP, led by Alberto Nuñez Feijoo, came out on top. It won three million more voters than in 2019, absorbing both voters from the liberal Ciudadanos party and some of those from the far-right Vox party. Undoubtedly also, some disappointed with the Socialist Party. However, at the end of the ballot, it seems unlikely, if not impossible, that Mr. Feijoo will succeed in articulating a majority in favor of his investiture and therefore of forming a government. Elected four consecutive times as president of the regional government of Galicia (north-west) between 2009 and 2022 – each time by an absolute majority – this 61-year-old senior official was aiming for 150 seats.
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Vox, with 12.5% of the vote (−3 points) and 33 MPs, lost 19 seats in Parliament. The far-right party has undoubtedly suffered both from the “useful vote”, which focused on the PP, and from the sterile and worrying gestures of its local representatives, particularly in terms of censorship of films and plays, or even its refusal to participate in minutes of silence for the victims of sexist violence. His ultranationalist program, criticizing the “climate fanaticism” and rejecting abortion proposed in particular to reverse the Spanish decentralization system and to abolish the autonomous regions or even to expel all illegal immigrants.
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The two political forces PP and Vox – who govern together, in coalition, three regions and more than 130 municipalities – have lost their bet. In total, they are seven seats away from an absolute majority. Even adding the two right-wing regionalist deputies from Navarre and the Canary Islands, the account is not there for “the rights”, which capped at 171 seats.
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