2024 - Early elections - Parliamentary elections in Spain: Conservatives facing electoral success

Spain has voted: According to media forecasts, the left-wing government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has been voted out.
The election winner is the conservative People’s Party PP led by opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo, which achieves 145 to 150 seats.
However, the PP clearly misses the absolute majority and is therefore dependent on cooperation with the right-wing populists from Vox.
According to the forecasts, PP and Vox together have 169 to 177 seats. The absolute majority is 176.
Currently, 80 percent of the votes have been counted, with the PP leading the way.

The forecast comes from the state TV broadcaster RTVE. Other media published similar figures. According to RTVE, Sánchez’s Socialists (PSOE) are trailing behind in second place with 113 to 118 seats. According to the RTVE forecast, Vox ranks fourth with 24 to 27 seats behind the left-wing electoral alliance Sumar (28 to 31).

Paradoxically, lead candidate Santiago Abascal’s controversial and often far-right party got far fewer seats than it did in the last general election in 2019, when it got 52. After this vote, however, it will probably have much more political weight than last time.

SRF: The first results, which are still very uncertain, show a head-to-head race between left and right. Does that come as a surprise?

Foreign editor Beat Vogt: Yes, after the first counts, the picture looks much less clear than the surveys had predicted. Most assumed that the conservative People’s Party – the Partido Popular – would win. But now the Socialist Party of the current Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is on par. However, with around 130 seats, both parties are far from an absolute majority of 176 seats. So they both depend on smaller allies to govern.

And what about these?

Also relatively balanced: The right-wing nationalist Vox is currently in third place, just ahead of the left-wing alliance Sumar – both with around 30 seats. In other words, everything remains open.

According to the media forecasts, the PP and Vox have a chance of achieving an absolute majority together. If that is not the case, they will have to rely on the support or at least the toleration of smaller parties in the “Congreso de los Diputados”. As this is still uncertain, the EU’s fourth-largest economy, which currently holds the presidency of the Union, is sure to face weeks of negotiations.

Observers on the state TV broadcaster RTVE warned of the possibility of a new “bloqueo”, a political blockade with months of negotiations to form a government, as Spain experienced twice in a row after the parliamentary elections of 2015 and 2019. In each case, a further vote was necessary.

There is no so-called firewall to the right in Spain, as there is in Germany against the AfD. In some regions, PP and Vox already rule together. A “grand coalition” is unthinkable in Spain. Sánchez does not even want to tolerate a PP minority government and therefore leaves him “no choice” but to speak to Vox, Feijóo emphasized several times.

Legend:

EPO/VILLAR LOPEZ

At 2 p.m. the turnout in the early parliamentary elections in Spain looked good, by 6 p.m. it had fallen below the value of the last vote in 2019. At 6 p.m. – two hours before the end of the election – it was 53 percent. At the same time, the last parliamentary vote in 2019 was still 56.85 percent, the Interior Ministry reported. Not counting the postal votes, which rose to a record 2.5 million in this election.