Given largely winning for months by all polls, the Spanish right is only narrowly ahead of the Socialists of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Sunday evening, who, against all odds, retains a chance of staying in power thanks to the game of alliances, according to partial results.
After counting just over three-quarters of the votes, Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s People’s Party (PP) won 132 seats out of a total of 350 in the Congress of Deputies and the far-right Vox party, its only potential ally, 33 seats.
The PP therefore won 43 more seats than in the previous elections, in 2019, but was far from the 150 seats that Mr. Feijóo visited. Above all, the PP and Vox would total only 165 seats, far from the absolute majority necessary to govern, which is 176.
The Socialist Party of Sánchez was credited with 126 deputies and Sumar, his radical left ally, with 30.
But Sánchez, in power for five years, is in a better position than his rival and can hope to stay in power, as he has a chance of winning the support of the Basque and Catalan parties for whom Vox is a bogeyman.
If no viable majority emerges, new elections could take place, in a country that has had four general elections between 2015 and 2019.
The polls carried out over the last few days, the results of which were published when the Vogte offices closed at 6:00 p.m. GMT, all predicted a large victory for the PP and even the possibility of an absolute majority with the support of Vox.
After voting, Feijóo, a former PP regional baron who hoped his “time” had “come” to lead the country, said he hoped Spain would “enter a new era”.
Plebiscite at the head of the PP, a year ago, this 61-year-old moderate politician had campaigned on “the repeal of Sanchism”, a neologism referring to the name of Mr. Sánchez, whom the right accused of having crossed red lines, in particular by pardoning the Catalan separatists condemned for the attempted secession of 2017 or by negotiating in Parliament the support of the Basque party Bildu, heir to the political showcase of ETA, to have his reforms.
gamble
Accustomed to poker moves, Sánchez tried a new one by calling this early ballot the day after the rout of the left in the local elections at the end of May to try to regain the initiative.
Campaigning on his track record, which is rather good in economic matters, he above all stirred up fear of the far right in an attempt to mobilize the electorate frightened by Vox’s entry into government.
A government coalition between the PP and Vox would have marked the return to power of the far right in Spain for the first time since the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975, almost half a century ago.
Sánchez could have obtained from a strong mobilization of the left, the participation having reached almost 70%, 3.5 points more than in the last ballot, in November of 2019.
Nearly 2.5 million Spaniards voted by post in particular, a record figure due to the fact that this election was the first to be organized in the middle of summer.
Vox already governs with the PP in three of the 17 regions of the country where this formation, born at the end of 2013 from a split in the PP, has shown that it does not plan to let go of its priorities.
This control has caused unusual interest abroad due to the failure of a PP/Vox coalition to come to power in a country considered a pioneer in the rights of women or those of the LGBT+ community.
Very close to the positions of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Vox rejects the existence of gender violence, criticizes “climate fanaticism” and is very openly anti-LGBT and anti-abortion.
In a column published Sunday in the French daily Le Monde, the former British Labor Prime Minister Gordon Brown revealed that an entry of Vox into the government “could have repercussions on the whole continent”.