Popular Party (PP, right) supporters during a meeting in Seville, June 19, 2022. CRISTINA QUICLER / AFP
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialists suffered another electoral setback in their former stronghold of Andalusia (South) on Sunday June 19 during a key regional election that puts the right in a position of strength after a year and half of the next national Choose.
According to the final result, the Popular Party (PP, right), whose candidate Juan Manuel Moreno has presided over the region since 2018, has obtained an absolute majority in the Andalusian Parliament with 58 seats out of 109, versus 30 for the Socialist Party (PSOE), while the radical left with which he governs Madrid has collapsed (7 seats versus 17 in 2018). Vox (far right) has 14 elected members (two more than in the last election). The centrists of Ciudadanos have disappeared from the regional parliament.
This setback is the third setback inflicted by the right-wing on the Spanish left in a regional election, after Madrid in May 2021 and Castile and León in February. This success puts the new leader of the PP, Alberto Nuñez Feijoo, in a strong position ahead of the next national elections, scheduled for late 2023.
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“Hard blow” for leftists, the PP “in good momentum”
Andalusia, the country’s most populous region with 8.5 million people, is a former historic bastion of the Socialists, which they ruled continuously from 1982 until the last regional elections in 2018. Overwhelmed by a corruption scandal, they were then ousted from power by a coalition of the PP and the centrists of Ciudadanos, supported in the regional parliament by the far-right Vox party.
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Troubling Pedro Sanchez, stemming Vox’s progress and eliminating Ciudadanos, who won no seats, the PP won by every measure in Andalusia. Indeed, the absolute majority will save him from having to form a coalition with Vox, as he recently had to do in the Castilla y León region.
Poor progress by far-right Vox party
For the first time since the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975, the extreme right entered a regional government with far-reaching powers. Third national-level political force, Vox, which burst onto the scene during Spanish politics The 2018 Andalusian regional election leaned heavily on Sunday’s vote but saw little progress with fourteen regional MPs down from 12 four years ago.
A new alliance with Vox would have weakened Alberto Nuñez Feijoo, who came to the head of the PP in early April defending a moderate line. “Andalusia is showing us a way”, that of “moderation, dialogue, social progress”, he declared recently, while Juan Manuel Moreno had asked for a “useful vote” for “a strong government” that was not “conditioned”. by Vox.
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“There is a very visible strategy” by the PP to present itself “as a reasonable alternative” to the Socialists in view of the next national elections, “a centre-right option,” according to Oscar Garcia Luengo, professor of political science at the university from Granada.