The conservative Popular Party (PP) won this Sunday’s elections in Spain, taking 136 seats with 97% of the vote counted, 47 more than in 2019, while the Socialist Party (PSOE) came in second with 122, two more than in previous elections, although the result complicates the process of forming a government.
That’s because neither right nor left bloc initially has enough representatives to win an outright majority (176 seats) in the first round of an inaugural vote, or even a simple majority in a second where more yes votes than no votes would be required.
Rightwing party Vox lost 19 seats in these elections and will have 33 MPs in Congress, while leftwing platform Sumar finished fourth with 31 seats, four fewer than its predecessor Unidas Podemos won in previous elections.
Among the proindependence supporters, the ERC’s Catalans suffered a major setback, falling from 13 seats to seven, and those of the Junts per Catalunya lost one to remain with six, while the EHBildu Basques defeated the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) for the first time, with six MPs against five of the latter.
The Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG) retains its only seat, while the Canary Coalition won one, as did the Navarro regionalists from the Unión del Pueblo Navarro (UPN), so the new Congress will be highly fragmented with 11 different parties.
More than 37 million Spaniards were eligible to vote in these elections, 2.3 million of whom live abroad. Of the voters residing in Spain, 1,639,179 were able to vote for the first time, 18 years after the last election.
These elections set the record for the largest postal vote in the history of Spanish democracy: more than 2.47 million people voted in the middle of the country’s summer holidays.
Parliamentary elections in Spain, in which the representatives of the Chamber of Deputies (350) and Senate (265) are directly chosen, are held every four years, unless the head of government foresees them, as was the case this time after the PSOE’s defeat in regional elections in May.