If the elections are a state of mind, this Sunday’s elections in Spain are very much like a hoax. The right voted confidently in the victory almost all polls gave until it halted polling, but the sense of comeback the left has been able to build over the past week shatters all certainty and opens all possibilities.
Both the PSOE and Sumar managed to instill in their people the idea that the Maracanazo (victory against the favourite) of 1993 is possible, when Felipe González, despite all the polls, with a second debate and a great campaign final, managed to win a victory secured by José María Aznar with 300,000 votes. Adrián Barbón, the Asturian president, one of the few municipalities where the left resisted in the May 28 regional elections, endorsed this idea of the 1993 phenomenon at the end of Friday’s election campaign.
On the right, meanwhile, the PP privately admits there have been setbacks over the past week, but sees no turning point and is confident in a comfortable victory that will undo what they see as a mirage on the left. For the past week they have backed the idea of an overwhelming majority of almost 170 seats that would allow them to govern alone, but little by little they have lowered their expectations. Now they assume that they will most likely have to govern in a coalition with Vox, although Alberto Núñez Feijóo has dedicated the election campaign to trying to achieve this with as little violence as possible on the part of the extreme right, so as not to have to give them many or very relevant ministries.
It is precisely this idea that Vox could enter government and Santiago Abascal become vice-president that seems to have mobilized the left the most at the last minute, and all the more so after the debate three days ago on Wednesday confirmed the most extreme positions taken by the Vox boss. Feijóo’s mistakes over the past week also seem to have had a mobilizing effect on the progressives.
In the PSOE and in Sumar, they are enthusiastic about the outcome of this tripartite debate, which the socialists experienced as a second chance after the face-to-face fiasco of the 10th. On the left, they are convinced that Feijóo made a mistake by not going to the meeting. They believe it could cost him as much as Javier Arenas did in 2012 when he felt so strong that he decided not to risk it and not to take part in the Andalusian debate. Eventually he failed to govern, although all the polls favored it.
The debate also served to bolster Sumar, and thereby encourage progressives, thanks to the success of its chair, Yolanda Díaz. Far from facing each other in the closing stages, the PSOE and Sumar showed a harmony that makes their believers dream of a new left coalition, but now without the internal tensions that have wreaked so much havoc during this legislature.
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The polls conducted by the parties in the final days of the campaign say very different things, from those showing an overwhelming majority for the right to those indicating there is still one party and the blocs are very even. These unknowns are worrying the millions of Spaniards who will vote this Sunday – and the 2.47 million who did so by postal vote, a record number. There is far more optimism in the air on the left than was expected two weeks ago.
The polls have virtually the entire Spanish political class holding its breath. Tonight’s result jeopardizes the political projects of the four main state parties much more than usual and could also have important implications for the struggles between the sovereignists in Catalonia and the Basque Country.
In addition to the most important thing that will be decided this Sunday, the Spanish government, its political stance and the possibility of Spain joining the few countries in the world where the far right is in power, which would ultimately upset the balance in Europe, the future of the PP, PSOE, Sumar and Vox in the coming years is also at stake.
The President of the People’s Party and candidate for President of the Government, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, with his partner Eva Cárdenas on Saturday in a toy shop in A Coruña. David Mudarra (People’s Party/EFE)
Feijóo is a solid leader of the PP: he managed to unite the party and he had the support of both Mariano Rajoy and José María Aznar, always very divided in the two souls of the PP, and he brought back more extreme figures like Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo to win the voice of the hard wing close to Vox. In a year and a half she has managed to stabilize the party and to assert herself without major confrontations in all the sectors and families that make up her. If he succeeds in governing, as most polls showed last week, he will have maxed out in a race of electoral success in Galicia. However, if he does not win the elections, he has already announced that he will leave the leadership of the PP.
It’s not clear what would happen if he wins but doesn’t govern, a scenario he himself has suggested during the course of the election campaign. In doing so, Feijóo prepared the ground for a massive political and media battle to get the PSOE to let him govern, as he had done with Mariano Rajoy in 2016. But the Socialists, and not only Sanchez’s entourage but also relevant regional barons who were consulted, completely rule out the scenario they already experienced with enormous trauma seven years ago, when their leader was pressed to resign and the bases again supported him in rejecting this decision.
The future of the PP is at stake if Feijóo crushes the huge expectations it has raised and promotes the idea of a landslide victory that would even allow him to rule alone. At the end of the election campaign, the PP leader changed his speech significantly and at one of the last rallies showed his nervousness about the possibility of not creating a majority: “Either we destroy them, or they will try to govern after losing.” He even supported the idea that the competition is “rigged” because it is not enough for the PP to win the elections, they have to join Vox, otherwise everyone else will gang up against them.
The Swedish example
This is exactly what happened to the PSOE in 2019 in Madrid, in Castilla y León or in Murcia, and again two weeks ago in Extremadura and the Canary Islands, where it does not govern, although it won because the PP joined the others – Vox and the Canary Coalition – in removing them from power. However, Feijóo insists on ignoring this recent reality because he understands that La Moncloa must have different rules than the autonomies, even though the constitution provides that the President is appointed by Congress with an absolute majority and that in all parliamentary systems in Europe and the world, the one with the greatest support governs.
In fact, the leader of the PP keeps saying that he would not be able to speak to the European prime ministers if he were not the one with the most votes. And he has repeatedly cited the example of Sweden, a country whose prime minister is neither the first nor the second party, but the third, which has allied with the second, far-right, to unseat the first, the Social Democrats.
The one whose political future is most at stake anyway is the PSOE and in particular Pedro Sánchez, who faces the riskiest bet of all this Sunday. The president decided to press ahead with the elections after his party failed in local and regional elections on May 28, where he lost almost all power, albeit not as many votes. Today we will know whether he brought the end of his political career forward with this decision or whether he reached the umpteenth epic page of his resistance manual.
Pedro Sánchez with his wife, after an outing during the day of reflection before the elections, in an image broadcast on his social networks.
A poor PSOE result or a landslide victory for the right would in all likelihood herald a cycle change in the centenary party that has ruled Spain for 29 of 41 years since 1982, when Felipe González arrived in La Moncloa. The PSOE is already beginning to take steps to set the stage for a possible departure of its secretary-general should anything go wrong tonight. But everything is frozen awaiting the outcome, and even more so after the last week, in which leaders of all stripes, not just those loyal to Sánchez, have noticed an unexpected movement in the background that is fueling hopes of a surprise turnaround, or at least a much larger resistance than expected.
Adding is also at stake tonight. It is the latest of the four projects vying for government, the only one to be published in these elections, and it has taken great efforts to forge the pact between the parties that gave rise to the creation of Yolanda Díaz. The election campaign, and especially Wednesday’s debate, have been crucial in leaving the internal noise behind and focusing on a good result that will allow him to consolidate the political project. Díaz insists Sumar is here to stay, be it in government or in opposition, but he must at least get closer to the 35 seats United We Can now have to solidify the formation and prevent the family war from erupting again. If he succeeds, he will have reassembled a left that seemed shattered in local elections, with a result that contributed to the loss of many autonomies and councillors.
Sumar’s candidate for the presidency of the government, Yolanda Díaz, third from right, over an aperitif in a relaxed atmosphere with party colleagues such as Alejandra Jacinto (right), Elizabeth Duval (second from left), Gioconda Belli (left) and Carla Antonelli (second from right) at Bar La Gloria in Madrid’s Noviciado district this Saturday. TOTAL/EFE
Vox also has a litmus test. Abascal, a professional politician from the extreme right wing of the PP since the age of 19, left after never reaching the first division, founded the party and stoically endured when he had only 50,000 votes in all of Spain and never even dreamed of an MP. Now he has a real chance to become Spain’s vice-president with the PP, the same formation that underestimated him. However, Vox is on the ground, the 52 seats in 2019 are practically impossible and it has suffered badly in the last two weeks to withstand the onslaught of the PP with the useful vote.
It could happen to United We Can in the 2019 repeat, which had a lot more power with fewer votes than the previous year because they became essential. But there could also be a major fiasco if the PP re-enlists a large part of its electorate and tries to kick them out of government, or worse, if it doesn’t step in because it doesn’t have an absolute majority between the two. Vox faces the ultimate challenge of consolidating and being one of the few far-right parties in power in one of the world’s most important democracies, or turning to a position of insignificance in the face of a dominant PP.
The Vox boss and candidate for the presidency of the government, Santiago Abascal, in Madrid on Friday. JUAN MEDINA (Portal)
So, on a dizzying night, everything is in the air. Spain can give way to the right and the far right, riding the horse of anti-sanchism and the extraordinary mobilization of conservatives to unseat the president, or end it with a final wave of unexpected progressive comebacks to support the coalition and allow for a calmer reboot, as its leaders promise. Contrary to what some say, nothing is decided until the polls open and the votes are counted. 2.47 million of these are already in the postal voting envelopes, but nobody knows at the moment what they contain. It will be a night of intense emotions, paving the way to four years yet to be written, but which will hardly be matched by the epic of the unique combination of a pandemic, an economic crisis with an unprecedented shutdown of production and, as everything began to calm down, the first war of invasion in Europe since 1945 and the highest inflation in 40 years.
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