Public holidays and weather could affect turnout Albert Gea/Portal 23/07/2023
A The Spaniards vote this Sunday (23) in early parliamentary electionswith the rightwing favorite to win the Prime Minister’s coalition, the socialist Pedro Sánchez, but with the possibility of having to govern with the extreme right.
Around 37.5 million voters can cast their ballots at the ballot box to extend parliament by four years. Almost 2.5 million people have already voted by maila record figure given that many Spaniards are on vacation this summer, a context that could affect their attendance at the elections.
“What is going to happen here today will be very important, of course not only for us but also for the world and for Europe,” said the outgoing government’s president, Socialist Pedro Sánchez, after the vote at a school in Madrid. “I’m in good spirits,” said Sánchez, who called for “historic participation” so that the next “will be a strong government so Spain can move forward.”
“Spain can start a new era and I hope and wish that the Spaniards will decide freely, as we are doing today, despite my emphasis on weather conditions,” he also said in the Spanish capital, after voting for Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the Popular Party (PP, Conservatives), who was the favorite in the polls.
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Santiago Abascal, head of the rightwing extremist formation Vox, predicted “a heroic outcome” for his party and called for participation so that “a change of direction can take place”.
A swing to the right in the EU’s fourthlargest economy after Italy last year would be another swing to the left, which governs just half a dozen of its 27 member countries less than a year before elections to the Union’s parliament. An even more symbolic blow for the country that currently holds the biennial EU presidency.
alliance with the extreme right
“For Spain, a PPVOX coalition government would be beneficial because it would focus more on improving the country,” Brayan Sánchez, a 27yearold computer scientist of Ecuadorian origin who voted in Barcelona, told AFPTV.
Brauli Muñoz, a 53yearold teacher, also in the Catalan capital, said he hopes the leftwing government will go ahead because “it’s one of the best education opportunities for the future of our students”.
“It would be a very important surprise if the PP wasn’t the party with the most votes. Another thing is that it can form a government,” said political scientist Pedro Riera Sagrera, a professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.
Feijóo is aiming for the magic number of 176 MPs, the absolute majority of the 350 in the House of Representatives. But no research attributes this result to him. However, it would have to resort to an alliance and its only potential partner is Vox, an ultranationalist and ultraconservative party that emerged from a split in the PP in 2013.
After May’s local elections, the PP and Vox agreed with local and regional governments in which the extreme right refused to back down its most controversial positions, such as challenging the notion of genderbased violence, opposing the LGBT movement and denying climate change.
Vox already warned that the price of his support would be entry into the Feijóo government, what that would mean Return of the extreme right to power for the first time since the Franco dictatorship (19391975).
risk of clogging
In the days leading up to the election, Feijóo said that a coalition with Vox was “not ideal”. Sánchez, who called for snap general elections after the left’s defeat in local elections in May, said such a possibility would be “a setback for Spain” as the right and the far right promised to reverse much of the legislative gains of recent years.
Sánchez, in power since 2018, wants to repeat his current coalition of socialists and the radical left. Podemos, an uncomfortable partner of Sánchez since early 2020, was taken over this year and replaced by Sumar, a formation led by Labor Minister, communist and pragmatist Yolanda Díaz.
“A big risk,” said Pedro Riera Sagrera, is that the elections will not result in a viable majority on either the right or the left, which would force a new vote in a few months.