In elections to renew the local parliament in Andalusia, one of Spain’s main autonomous communities (roughly the equivalent of our regions), the centre-right Popular Party won an absolute majority for the first time in its history in a region historically dominated by the left had been.
The winner of the elections is the outgoing governor and local leader of the People’s Party (PP) Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, also known as Juanma Moreno. The 52-year-old leader of the Andalusian PP since 2014, when he was elected by then-Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, Moreno had become in 2018 the first Andalusian governor not to be on the left, thanks to a rather grueling victory: his government backed by one broad and controversial coalition that included the centrists of Ciudadanos and the extreme right of Vox.
But in Sunday’s elections, the PP managed to secure an absolute majority in total autonomy: 58 seats (the majority is 55), which could allow it to govern alone: without Vox, which slightly improved its position (from 12 to 14 seats) and excluding Ciudadanos, which has completely disappeared from the Andalusian Parliament: from 21 to zero seats. It’s an important result for Moreno, considering that the PP had only 26 seats in the last legislature.
In this graphic from the newspaper el Diario, the PP is represented in blue, the PSOE in red, Vox in light green and the radical left in the two darkest greens. In orange there are only in the scheme 2018 Ciudadanos
The left suffered a historic defeat: the Socialist Party (PSOE) rose from 33 to 30 seats, but most notably the more radical left, split into two small coalitions, rose from 17 seats to seven.
Part of the credit for the win, according to analysts, goes to the PP’s national leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who was appointed this year and is trying to transform the party into a more moderate and centrist force, abandoning attempts of recent years of rapprochement with Vox.