Because he lost the parliamentary elections in all polls, the socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez managed on Sunday to limit the gains of the right-wing opposition and, thanks to the alliance game, to keep a chance against all odds to stay in power in extreme cases.
After counting more than 99% of the vote, the Popular Party (PP) of its conservative rival Alberto Núñez Feijóo won a total of 136 seats in the Chamber of Deputies out of a total of 350, and the far-right party Vox, its only potential ally, won 33 seats.
With that, the PP won 47 more seats than in the previous elections in 2019, but fell far short of the 150 seats Mr Feijóo had been aiming for. In particular, PP and Vox, which have lost ground compared to the last election, together have only 169 seats, while the absolute majority is 176. Mr Sánchez’s Socialist Party is credited with just 122 MPs, and Sumar, his radical left ally, 31.
Sanchez in a better position
But Mr Sánchez, who has been in power for five years, is paradoxically in a better position than his conservative rival and can hope to remain in power because of the opportunity to garner support from the Basque and Catalan parties, for which Vox is a bogeyman.
“The declining People’s Party-Vox bloc is defeated,” he told socialist activists gathered outside his party’s headquarters. “Many of us want Spain to keep moving forward,” he continued. However, Mr. Feijóo achieved the victory. The PP had “won the elections,” he exclaimed from the balcony of party headquarters, reaffirming his intention to “form a government” and calling on the Socialists not to “block” such a government.
“Real surprise”
“It’s a real surprise, the Socialist Party has put up a much better fight than expected. There are two scenarios: (keeping) Sánchez (in power) or snap elections,” Teneo analyst Antonio Barroso told AFP. Polls conducted over the past five days, the results of which were released as required by law when polls closed at 18:00 GMT, all predicted a big victory for the PP and even the possibility of an outright majority with the support of Vox.
Mr Feijóo would like to rule as the winner of the elections, but without an absolute majority he would need the abstentions of the Socialists in an investiture vote in Parliament, who ‘will not give him that majority’, Mr Barroso continues. Indeed, given the results, Mr Sánchez seems capable of assembling 172 MPs in his name, more than the leader of the PP, and could therefore return to power unless the party of Catalan separatist Carles Puigdemont votes against him.
Otherwise, Spain, which has already experienced four general elections between 2015 and 2019, would find itself in a new situation of political stalemate and doomed to a new ballot.
gamble
Mr. Sánchez is used to poker moves and therefore keeps the odds of winning on his last bet. Wanting to regain the initiative after the left’s defeat in local elections at the end of May, he called these snap elections and campaigned out of fear of entering the government of Vox, who with the PP already leads three of the country’s 17 regions, to mobilize the electorate on the left.
A strategy that appears to have paid off: turnout reached almost 70%, or 3.5 points more than in the last election in November 2019. Mr Feijóo, who was hailed at the head of the PP last year, missed his shot. This former President of Galicia (North-West) campaigned for the “repeal of Sanchism”, a neologism referring to the name of Mr. Sánchez, who the right-wing accuses of having crossed red lines, notably by pardoning the Catalan separatists convicted of the 2017 secession attempt, or by speaking in Parliament about supporting the Basque party Bildu, heir to ETA’s political showcase, for the adoption of his reform en negotiated.
At the PP headquarters in Madrid, Carmen Rodríguez de la Cruz expressed disappointment. “I didn’t expect that, I have to endure Sánchez for four more years,” she told AFP.
This election has attracted unusual interest abroad given the possibility of a PP/Vox coalition coming to power in a country seen as a frontrunner on women’s rights or the LGBT+ community. Such a scenario, which seems unlikely today, would have meant 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.