By Le Figaro with AFP
Posted yesterday at 11:55pm, updated yesterday at 11:58pm
Outgoing Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and PP candidate Alberto Núñez Feijoo. PIERRE-PHILIPPE MARCOU / AFP
The Popular Party’s (PP) victory was far narrower than expected, which could allow Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to remain in power.
Since the right has been the clear winner of the parliamentary elections in Spain in all polls for months, on Sunday evening they were only just ahead of the socialists of the socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who, despite all the odds, thanks to the alliance game, has a chance of staying in power, according to partial results.
After counting 99% of the vote, the interior ministry predicts 136 seats for the Popular Party (PP) and 122 for the Socialists, while the Vox party is in third place with 33 seats, just ahead of Sumar, a radical left party allied with Sánchez, which would have 31 seats. 176 votes are required to achieve an absolute majority.
Sánchez, who has been in power for five years, is in a better position than his rival and can hope to remain in power given a chance to garner support from the Basque and Catalan parties, for whom Vox is a bogeyman. Failure to form a viable majority could result in new elections in a country that had four general elections between 2015 and 2019.
Also read “Bad passport on the left in Spain”
Right polls
However, it was the most important election since the country’s democracy, as the polls of the last few days had all predicted a victory for Alberto Núñez Feijoo’s PP. With the possible coming to power of an alliance between the traditional right and the ultra-nationalist, ultra-conservative and Europhobic Vox party, which denies the existence of gender-based violence, criticizes “climate fanaticism” and is openly anti-LGBT and anti-abortion. Such a scenario would have marked the return to power of the extreme right in Spain for the first time since the end of Franco’s dictatorship in 1975, almost half a century ago.
Alberto Núñez Feijoo said after the vote that he hoped Spain would “enter a new era”. This election was “very important (…) for the world and for Europe,” Pedro Sánchez estimated.