Spain began voting on Sunday for crucial early parliamentary elections, in which the right-wing opposition is the big favorite and which could also bring the far right to power. Polling stations opened at 9 a.m. local time. Some 37.5 million voters are called upon to renew the 350 members of the Congress of Deputies for four years and to elect 208 senators.
A “very important” election
Of the four main candidates, the outgoing Prime Minister, Socialist Pedro Sánchez, was the first to vote, around 9:10 a.m., accompanied by his wife. This election is “very important (…) for the world and for Europe” he told the press, relaxed and smiling, leaving the polling station in the center of Madrid, claiming to have “good feelings” about the result.
Above all, he wanted “a historic participation”, so that the government that emerges from the ballot box is “a strong government so that Spain can move forward over the next four years”. Nearly 2.5 million people have already 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. The vote will end at 8 p.m. (6 p.m. GMT) but due to the absence of exit polls, it will take about an hour for the publication of the first results.
With the approach of the European elections of 2024, the shift to the right, with perhaps the participation in power of the far right, of the fourth largest economy in the euro zone, after that of Italy last year, would constitute a stinging setback for the European lefts. This would be all the more symbolic since Spain currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU.
Right-far-right alliance?
All the opinion polls published until Monday considered a victory for the People’s Party (PP, right) of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, 61, almost certain, but the fact that their publication was banned for the five days preceding the election calls for caution.
Especially since there were still many undecided at the start of the week and we do not know the effect of the date of this election, accompanied by very high temperatures, on participation. Mr. Feijóo aims to reach the magic number of 176 deputies, which would give him an absolute majority of the 350 seats in the Congress of Deputies. But not a single poll has contemplated such a score for the PP. He should therefore resort to an alliance. However, its only potential partner is Vox, a far-right, ultra-nationalist and ultra-conservative party, born in 2013 from a split in the PP.
Mr. Feijóo’s campaign has also been seriously disrupted by the PP’s negotiations with Vox to establish pacts in several regions taken to the left during the local elections on May 28. Because the far-right party has made no compromise on its priorities, including the rejection of the concept of gender violence, the rejection of transgender people and the denial of climate change. Vox leader Santiago Abascal has already warned the PP that the price of its support will be participation in a Feijóo government, which would mark the far-right’s return to power, nearly half a century after the end of the Franco dictatorship.
If he wins, Mr. Feijóo, who describes the PP as “a reformist center-right party”, should therefore undoubtedly ally with the extreme right in order to be able to govern. Until the end, he kept his intentions vague. “Two days before the election, a candidate should not say who he is going to ally with,” he said in an interview with the daily El Mundo on Friday, adding that a coalition government with Vox “is not ideal”.
Sanchez’s strategy
Given beaten after the rout of the left in the local elections, which had convinced him to call this early election, Mr. Sánchez, 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”, which he considers as white hat and white hat, the outgoing Prime Minister, who has put forward the European map, affirmed 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”.
For him, the only alternative to a PP / Vox government is the maintenance in power of the current left-wing coalition, set up in 2020, between his socialist party and the radical left. On the side of the latter, Podemos, which for three years was an inconvenient partner of Mr. Sánchez, was absorbed and replaced this year by Sumar, a formation directed by the outgoing Minister of Labour, the communist and very pragmatic Yolanda Díaz.