2023-07-23 23:30:24
It’s unexpected. The Socialists still have a chance to stay in power. Given largely winning for months by all the polls, the Spanish right is only narrowly ahead of the party of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Sunday evening. Against all expectations, he could remain in office thanks to the game of alliances, according to partial results.
After counting just over three quarters of the votes, the People’s Party (PP) led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo won 132 seats out of a total of 350 in Congress. And the far-right Vox party, its only potential ally, 33 seats. The PP would therefore win 43 more seats than in the previous elections, in 2019. It would therefore come a long way from the 150 seats that Feijóo was aiming for. Above all, the PP and Vox would total only 165 seats, far from the absolute majority necessary to govern, which is 176.
All about wedding rings
The Socialist Party was credited with 126 deputies and Sumar de Yolanda Díaz, its radical left ally, 30. Thus, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is in a better position than his rival. And he can hope to stay in power, because he has a chance of obtaining the support of the Basque and Catalan parties who will refuse an agreement with Vox.
After voting, Feijóo, a former PP regional baron who hoped his “time” had “come” to lead the country, said he hoped Spain would “enter a new era”. Acclaimed at the head of the PP, a year ago, had campaigned on “the repeal of Sanchism”, a neologism referring to the name of the Prime Minister, whom the right accuses of having crossed red lines. In particular by pardoning the Catalan separatists condemned for the 2017 secession attempt, or by negotiating in Parliament the support of the Basque party Bildu, heir to the political showcase of ETA, to have its reforms adopted.
Accustomed to poker moves, Sánchez tried a new one by calling this early ballot the day after the rout of the left in the local elections at the end of May. Campaigning on his record, which is rather good in economic matters, he has constantly denounced “the tandem formed by the far right and the far right”. He felt that a PP/Vox coalition government “would not only be a setback for Spain” in terms of rights, “but also a serious setback for the European project”.
For Sánchez, the only alternative is to keep the current left-wing coalition, set up in 2020, between his socialist party and the radical left in power. A government coalition between the PP and Vox would have marked the return to power of the far right in Spain for the first time since the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975, almost half a century ago.
According to the first estimates, Sánchez could have benefited from a strong mobilization of the left. Participation having reached nearly 70%, i.e. 3.5 points more than during the last election, in November 2019. Nearly 2.5 million Spaniards notably voted by post, a record figure due to the fact that this election was the first organized in the middle of summer.
But if no viable majority emerges, new elections could take place, in a country that has had four general elections between 2015 and 2019.
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