Spaniards are mobilizing vigorously on Sunday for Europe-watched general elections in which the right-wing opposition is the big favorite but which could also see the far-right in power for the first time since the end of the Franco regime.
As a sign of the importance attached to this election, turnout as of 2:00 p.m. (12:00 GMT) rose sharply to 40.48% from 37.92% in the last general election in 2019.
That figure also doesn’t include the 2.47 million people who voted by mail out of 37.5 million voters — a record number given that this election is being held for the first time in the middle of summer.
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Faced with the election winner, Popular Party (PP, right) leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo said on Sunday he hoped Spain would “start a new era”.
This election is “very important (…) for the world and for Europe,” said Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who has been in power for five years.
Polling stations will close at 20:00 (18:00 GMT) but it will take around an hour for the first partial results to be released.
This election is attracting unusual interest abroad, given the possibility of an alliance coming to power between the conservative right and the ultra-nationalist and ultra-conservative Vox party, which denies the existence of gender-based violence, criticizes “climate fanaticism” and is very openly anti-LGBT and anti-abortion.
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Such a scenario would see the far right return to power in Spain for the first time since the end of Franco’s dictatorship nearly half a century ago.
With the 2024 European elections looming, the rightward swing of the eurozone’s fourth largest economy after Italy last year would spell a major setback for the European left, all the more symbolic given that Spain currently holds the rotating EU presidency.
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In a column published in French daily Le Monde on Sunday, former British Labor Prime Minister Gordon Brown estimated that a Vox entry into government – which he said would mean a “surrender of the Spanish Conservatives to the far right” – “would have repercussions across the continent”.
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All opinion polls released up to Monday thought a victory for 61-year-old Mr Feijóo’s PP was almost certain, but the fact that its publication was banned in the five days leading up to the election urges caution.
Mr. Feijóo’s goal is to win an absolute majority of 176 MPs in the Chamber of Deputies so that the PP can govern alone. However, such a result was not taken into account in any survey and the PP should therefore fall back on an alliance.
His only potential partner is Vox, a party that emerged from a split in the PP in 2013, with which he already governs three of the country’s 17 regions. However, Vox boss Santiago Abascal warned that the price of his support is a stake in the government.
“A coalition government between PP and Vox would be beneficial because it would aim to improve Spain and not make everyone happy,” Brayan Sánchez, a 27-year-old computer scientist who voted in Barcelona (northeast), told AFPTV.
An analysis dismissed by Laia Ricard, a 46-year-old Catalan actress, who felt that such a coalition would be “disastrous on all levels” for her region, given that Vox was a strong supporter of Catalan independence.
Mr Feijóo, who described the PP as “a reformist centre-right party”, remained vague about his intentions until the very end, but admitted in an interview with daily El Mundo on Friday that a coalition government with Vox is “not the ideal”.
Faced with the left’s defeat in May’s municipal elections, which prompted him to hold these early elections, Mr Sánchez, 51, has scarecrowed Vox to exploit fears of the far right.
He denounced “the tandem of the extreme right and the extreme right” and played the European card. He believed that a PP/Vox coalition government would be “not only a setback for Spain” in terms of the right, but “also a serious setback for the European project”.
For him, the only alternative is to keep in power the current left-wing coalition formed in 2020 between his socialist party and the radical left, represented by communist Labor Minister Yolanda Díaz.
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“For the people of my generation, these are the most important elections (…). The next decade is at stake,” warned Ms Díaz on Sunday, whose Sumar formation brings together some fifteen parties.