2023-07-24 13:15:00
ELECTIONS/SPAIN – Yesterday Sunday July 23, the voters elected the 350 seats of the Spanish Congress. The centre-right People’s Party wins the most votes, but does not seem able to form a government.
Although the elections took place in the height of summer, some 24 million Spaniards voted in person, while a record 2.4 million of them opted for postal voting.
At the end of the poll, the People’s Party of the Center Right won the votes, but was unable to form a government. Following the failure of the electoral consultation, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is expected to remain in power until new elections are organised.
The right at an impasse
As expected, none of the main Spanish parties won a government majority. The People’s Party has 136 seats, the Socialists 122, the far-right Vox party 33 and the left-wing Sumar party 31.
Ahead of the vote, conservative leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo indicated he would be willing to form a coalition government with Vox, but the two parties failed to secure the 176 seats needed to control Spain’s parliament.
There is no scenario in which Spanish MPs would support a minority government made up of the People’s Party and Vox. Moreover, Feijóo does not appear to have enough support from the country’s smaller regional parties to garner the backing he would need to form a minority government on his own.
The alliance strategy
Together with Yolanda Díaz’s left-wing Sumar coalition, the Prime Minister’s Socialist Party could form a coalition controlling 153 seats in parliament, but to govern it will have to strike deals with a variety of political groups with very different goals.
In 2019, Pedro Sánchez became Prime Minister following this same roadmap, after making alliances with regional parties. This means that the socialists will have to seek the support of Basque and Catalan nationalists, notably those who belong to the Junts party of former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont who went into exile in Belgium following the independence referendum of 2017.
Junts candidate Míriam Nogueras told the press that her party had “understood the result” and that he was going “take the opportunity.” “It is a possibility of change, of finding unity”she said. “But we will not make Pedro Sánchez a ‘president without compensation'”.
Nevertheless, it is unlikely that Sánchez will accept a new referendum or concede victory to Alberto Núñez Feijóo. It is even very likely that the current Spanish Prime Minister would prefer to organize new elections in the fall.
At the Socialist Party headquarters in Madrid on Sunday evening, euphoric supporters cheered Pedro Sánchez while shouting “Not pass !”, the anti-fascist slogan used by the Spanish government in its fight against Franco’s forces during the Civil War.
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