In Spain, the Socialist Party (PSOE), led by the president of the outgoing government, Pedro Sanchez, and the Popular Party (PP, conservatives), led by the Galician Alberto Nuñez Feijoo, were neck and neck, Sunday July 23, after the counting of 50% of the votes in the legislative elections. The Interior Ministry projects 131 seats for the left and 130 for the right. The far-right Vox party, credited with 31 seats, is in third position, ahead of the left-wing Sumar movement, an ally of Mr. Sanchez, which would get 30 seats.
The country is feverishly awaiting the final results of these legislative elections, which are also closely scrutinized elsewhere in Europe, because of the possible coming to power of an alliance between the PP and the ultra-conservative Vox party – ultranationalist, Europhobic, rejecting the existence of gender violence, anti-LGBT, anti-abortion etc. Such a scenario would mark 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.
Turnout, which had jumped 2.5 points at midday, was down sharply at 6 p.m. at 53.12% against 56.85% during the last legislative elections in 2019. This time, voters mobilized more in the morning, probably due to the heat. However, this figure does not include the 2.47 million people, out of 37.5 million voters, who voted by post – a record number due to the fact that this election is taking place, for the first time, in the middle of summer.
“Serious setback for the European project”
All the opinion polls published until Monday (in Spain, their distribution is prohibited five days before the election) considered a victory for the PP almost certain. The objective for the right-wing party is to win an absolute majority of 176 seats in the Chamber of Deputies in order to be able to govern alone. However, no poll has considered such a score. The PP’s only potential partner is Vox, with which it already governs in three of the seventeen Spanish regions. However, the leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, warned that the price of his support would be a participation in the government.
Given beaten after the rout of the left in the local elections in May, which had convinced him to call this early poll, Mr. Sanchez, 51, made Vox a scarecrow in order to play on the fear of the far right. denouncing “the tandem formed by the extreme right and the extreme right” and playing the European card, he felt that a PP/Vox coalition government “would not only be a setback for Spain” in terms of rights, “but also a serious setback for the European project”.
With the 2024 European elections approaching, an alliance between the conservatives and the far right at the head of the fourth largest economy in the euro zone would indeed constitute a stinging failure for the European left, all the more symbolic since Madrid currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU.
In a column published on Sunday on The worldthe former British Labor Prime Minister Gordon Brown considered that an entry of Vox into the government – synonymous, according to him, with “Spanish conservatives capitulate to the far right” – “would have repercussions on the whole continent”.