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Spaniards headed to the polls on Sunday choosing to re-elect Pedro Sanchez and his breakaway left-wing coalition or allow the conservatives to roll back the prime minister’s reforms in a possible deal with the far right.
Most opinion polls indicate that the opposition People’s Party will win the early general elections, but it does not achieve an outright majority. Alberto Nunez Figo, leader of the People’s Party, will likely need Vox’s support to take office, meaning the hard right could enter government for the first time since Spain’s return to democracy after the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975.
A conservative win would make Spain the latest European country to move to the right, joining Italy – whose Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni appeared via video link at a Vox rally this month – as well as Greece, Sweden and Finland.
Ramón Postigo, a coaching consultant who just cast his vote in central Madrid, said he switched his vote from PP in 2019 to Vox. “Because it’s the only way I see to make sure that PP implements certain policies,” he said. “On life, family, education, liberty…the People’s Party didn’t do the right thing in the past when it had an absolute majority. It needs someone to force it a bit.”
Feijóo pledged to bring efficiency and “dignity” to government, restore trust in institutions and repeal or amend laws that enshrined transgender rights, decriminalized euthanasia and aimed to address the legacy of the Spanish Civil War.
He describes himself as a moderate, but an alliance with Vox will bring demands for extremism. The far-right party led by Santiago Abascal is skeptical of climate change, hostile to immigration and wants to repeal a law that supports LGBT rights.
Sanchez, who leads a Socialist-led coalition, has been the underdog since suffering a defeat in local elections in May. But since he became the first leader to cast a ballot on Sunday, he said, “I have good feelings.”
He has warned that PP and Vox will take the country back from 2023 to 1973. In an interview with El País newspaper, he said: “There is something much more dangerous than Vox, and that is the presence of PP that assumes the policies and positions of Vox.”
According to El País simulation, Sanchez only has a 15-16 percent chance of getting another term. There is a 55 percent chance of a PP-Vox coalition, but it is likely that Spain’s small regional party pool means that the right- and left-wing blocs do not reach an outright majority of 176 seats in the 350-seat Congress. This will open the door to re-election, as happened in 2015-2016 and 2019.
The prime minister wanted to fight the election on two fronts: the economy, which has a headline inflation rate of just 1.9 percent, and high employment by Spanish standards; and his legislative achievements, which include reforms to increase pensions, end abuse of temporary employment contracts, regulate housing rents, and improve access to abortions.
But he is falling behind with the left-wing Sumar party, which he will join in a coalition, because the People’s Party campaigned around the figure of the prime minister and the “Frankenstein” political alliances he made to pass the laws.
The outcome will depend on how many disaffected socialist voters the People’s Party can attract, how many right-wingers can drop out of Vox, and whether Sanchez is able to energize left-wing voters with his warnings against ultraconservatives.
Inmaculada Gonzalez, who is retired, said she was tired of the bickering and indignities of Spanish politics and voted with limited enthusiasm for Sanchez. “It is the least bad option. Now there is no real statesman in any party. But the Labor Party and Fox frighten me more than the Socialist Party and Sumar. Since everything is so bitter it is impossible for any party to have an absolute majority, I have chosen the Socialists.”
Feijóo offered some obvious ideas such as lowering income taxes, reducing the size of government, and slowing the transition to more green energy. But his campaign was mostly negative and centered around the goal of ending “.Sanchismo’, a political ideology he defined as “the sum total of lies, manipulation and ugliness.”
“The elections weren’t won by the opposition. The government lost them. Feijóo’s position was that the government is doing badly and he just needs to avoid making mistakes and be a force for calm,” said Lorenzo Bernaldo de Quiros, president of Freemarket, a Madrid-based consultancy.
Figo’s message about Sanchez’s “lies” damaged the prime minister. Most damaging were Sanchez’s pledges not to work with the political parties whose votes he ended up relying on to pass laws.
One controversial ally is the radical left-wing Podemos party with which he formed a volatile coalition in 2019 – the first ruling coalition of its kind in modern Spain. Podemos blamed a failed sexual consent law that ended up overturning the prison sentences of more than 1,000 convicted sex offenders.
The prime minister was also hurt by his reliance on the parliamentary votes of EH Bildu, a Basque separatist party led by a convicted member of the disbanded terrorist group ETA. He has also been criticized for courting Catalan separatists by pardoning nine leaders imprisoned over an unconstitutional referendum in 2017.
In recent weeks, the governing agreements between the CPC and Fox at the local and regional levels have confirmed some of Sanchez’s warnings. The two parties abolished environmental departments, canceled equality initiatives, and banned LGBTQ flags in public buildings.
In the final days of the campaign, Feijóo was criticized for refusing to participate in a second debate with Sánchez and had to temporarily stop campaigning due to a bad back. He was also caught making the false claim that PP had always increased pensions in line with inflation when he was in government.
The campaign has taken Spain’s political polarization to new levels, said Maryam Martínez Paskonan, a professor of political science at the Autonomous University of Madrid.
“One of the things that struck me the most is that both sides use the same language,” she said.
“The word lie no longer means anything. There is a confrontation where they accuse each other of lying. We have a problem because they emptied these words of meaning.”
