Spain thrown into political limbo by inconclusive election result

Get free Spanish policy updates

We’ll send you a file myFT Daily Digest Rounding email to the latest Spanish politics News every morning.

Spain sank Sunday night into political uncertainty as both the right and left failed to secure a clear path to forming a government despite the opposition People’s Party winning the most seats in parliament.

The impasse leaves the EU’s fourth-largest economy in limbo and opens the door to weeks or months of chaotic negotiations over voting alliances – or re-elections, as happened in 2015-2016 and 2019.

Defying the difficulties, Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez put up enough resistance to prevent Alberto Núñez Figo’s People’s Party from securing a conservative parliamentary majority in alliance with the hard-right Vox party.

But although Sanchez did better than polls had predicted, and won two more seats than in 2019, he fell short of the outright majority needed to take office even with the support of his current allies.

However, a jubilant Sanchez told supporters outside his party headquarters that “the reactionary bloc of the People’s Party and Vox has been defeated.”

Figo said he won, but his stony face begged to be allowed to form a government because his party was the largest party in Congress. Figo said: “If the party with the most votes in Spain cannot rule, the only alternative is stalemate that does not benefit Spain, does not benefit our international prestige or the security of investments.”

However, Sánchez indicated in the campaign that he would not enable the People’s Party to form a minority government.

New parliamentary agreements will emerge only from fraught bargaining between the largest parties and two different sets of potential allies among Spain’s fragmented plate of small regional groups.

But neither of the towers most likely carries the People’s Party or the Socialists to the 176 seats needed for a majority in the 350-seat Congress.

The result gives a potential pivotal role for Together for Catalonia, a hardline separatist party with seven seats that could lead to a hard bargain to give its votes to Sanchez.

Feijóo’s position is complicated by the fact that his potential partner Vox is staunchly opposed to – and wants to ban – separatist political parties, making it difficult to envision one of them joining a conservative coalition.

If neither Figo nor Sanchez can reach a majority, Spaniards will have to vote in another general election, the sixth in eight years.

Vox leader Santiago Abascal, whose party won 19 fewer seats than it did in 2019, accused the People’s Party of discouraging voters by acting as if victory was guaranteed – and criticized Figo for not getting into the debate in the final week of the campaign.

“Some were selling bear skins before they went hunting and that had a clear consequence in terms of layoffs,” Abascal said.

Vox promised to present to a coalition government its denial of human-driven climate change, opposition to Muslim immigration, its challenge to the idea of ​​gender-based violence and its desire to overturn a law supporting LGBT rights.

After 100 percent of the votes were counted, the People’s Party won 136 seats and the Socialists 122 seats; Vox had 33 and Sumar – a neo-left group that would join a coalition with Sanchez – had 31.

Sanchez, 51, called an early general election after his party suffered a resounding defeat in municipal and provincial elections at the end of May, gambling that he would do better in July than if he waited until the expected election date in December.

Pollsters said he won over some wavering voters in the campaign’s final days with his warnings that a potential PP-Vox coalition would drag the country from 2023 to “1973.”

Others said the People’s Party failed because Feijóo, 61, focused his negative campaign on his criticism of “Sanchismo” – which he defined as the doctrine of “lies, manipulation and ugliness” – and did not offer a positive vision of Spain.

Feijóo has also launched vicious attacks on Sanchez’s controversial political alliances with pro-independence parties from Catalonia and the Basque Country, which enabled the prime minister to take office in 2018 and then pass landmark legislative reforms.