2023-07-23 17:53:53
Update
July 23, 2023
19:53
This election is arousing unusual interest abroad because of the possible coming to power of an alliance between the traditional right and the ultra-nationalist and ultra-conservative Vox party.
Spain feverishly awaits the result of legislative elections on Sunday, scrutinized throughout Europe, whose great favorite is the right-wing opposition but which might also bring the far right into government for the first time since the end of Francoism.
Participation, which had jumped 2.5 points at midday, was displayed in sharp decline at 4 p.m. at 53.12% once morest 56.85% during the last legislative elections of 2019, voters having rather mobilized in the morning due to the heat.
However, this figure does not include the 2.47 million people, out of 37.5 million voters, having 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 polling stations will close at 8 p.m. but it will take regarding an hour for the publication of the first partial results.
Given winner by the polls, the leader of the People’s Party (PP, right) Alberto Núñez Feijóo said on Sunday that he hoped that Spain would “enter a new era”.
This election is “very important (…) for the world and for Europe”, estimated for his part the socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, in power for five years.
Alliance of Rights?
This election is attracting unusual interest abroad because of the possible coming to power of an alliance between the traditional right and the ultra-nationalist and ultra-conservative Vox party, who rejects the existence of gender violence, criticizes “climate fanaticism” and is very openly anti-LGBT and anti-abortion.
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.
With the 2024 European elections approaching, the shift to the right of the euro zone’s fourth largest economy, following Italy last year, would constitute a scathing setback for the European leftall the more symbolic as Spain currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU.
In a column published Sunday in the French daily Le Monde, the former British Labor Prime Minister Gordon Brown estimated that an entry of Vox into the government – synonymous, according to him, with “capitulation of the Spanish conservatives in the face of the extreme right” – “would have repercussions across the continent“.
All the opinion polls published until Monday considered a victory for the PP of Mr. Feijóo, 61, almost certain, but the fact that their publication was banned for the five days preceding the election calls for caution. Mr. Feijóo’s aim is to win an absolute majority of 176 deputies in the Chamber of Deputies, so that the PP can govern alone. But not a poll has considered such a score and the PP should therefore resort to an alliance.
“Not ideal”
His only potential partner is Vox, gone born in 2013 from a split in the PP, with which he already governs in three of the 17 regions of the country. However the leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, warned that the price of his support would be a participation in the government.
Mr. Feijóo, who described the PP as “a reformist centre-right party”, kept his intentions vague until the endadmitting however on Friday, in an interview with the daily El Mundo, that a coalition government with Vox “is not ideal”.
Donne beaten following the rout of the left in the local elections in May, which had convinced him to call this early pollMr. Sánchez, 51, made Vox a bogeyman 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 considered 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 is to keep the current left-wing coalition, set up in 2020, in power. between his socialist party and the radical leftrepresented by Communist Labor Minister Yolanda Díaz.
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