Spain might be facing political gridlock and possibly a new election, but a national ballot produced one result that is welcomed across the capitals of Europe: A far-right party aiming to get its hands on the levers of power was thwarted.
Spain’s Vox party, with its ultranationalist bent, lost support among voters in Sunday’s election, dashing its hopes to be a kingmaker and enter a governing coalition that would have given the far right its first share of power in Spain since Francisco Franco’s 20th-century dictatorship.
The mainstream conservative Partido Popular (Popular Party, or PP) won the election, but performed well below polling data that had forecast it could oust Socialist Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez if it formed a government with Vox as a junior partner.
Photo: AFP
Even though the Socialists finished second, they and their allied parties celebrated the outcome as a victory since their combined forces gained slightly more seats than the PP and Vox. The bloc that would likely support Sanchez totaled 172 seats, while parties on the right had 170.
“This is a major victory for the left,” Jason Xidias, a lecturer in political science at New York University’s Madrid campus, said yesterday.
Political horse-trading in the coming weeks, when smaller regional parties could offer their support for a government in return for concessions, would be “very complicated,” Xidias said.
The closer-than-expected outcome placed a question mark over Spain’s future leadership, but the PP insisted it could not be denied its shot at forming a government.
“Nobody would understand it now if [other parties] all came together to prevent the party that won the elections from becoming the government,” PP deputy secretary Miguel Tellado told public broadcaster RTVE.
Sanchez put together Spain’s first ever coalition government, which took power in January 2020. He has been Spain’s prime minister since 2018. However, the chances of Sanchez picking up the support of the 176 lawmakers needed to have an absolute majority in the lower house of psarliament are not great.
The divided results have made the Catalan separatist party Junts (Together) key to Sanchez forming a government, but if Junts asked for a referendum on independence for Catalonia, that would likely be far too costly a price for Sanchez to pay.
With all votes counted, the PP collected 136 seats of the 350 up for grabs. Even with the 33 seats that the Vox got and the one seat going to an allied party, the PP was still seven seats short of a majority.
The Socialists gathered 122 seats, two more than they previously held. Sanchez could likely call on the 31 seats of its junior coalition partner Sumar (Joining Forces) and several smaller parties to at least total more than the sum of the right-wing parties, but would also fall four short of a majority unless Junts joined them.
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