2023-07-23 02:07:23
Early parliamentary elections are taking place in Spain this Sunday. A total of 37.5 million Spaniards are called to vote for 350 MPs. 1.6 million are voting for the first time. If polls by the opinion research institute GESOP are to be believed on Friday, opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s Conservatives (PP) should win the elections with 32.7 percent, ahead of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialists (PSOE), who can hope for 28.5 percent of the vote.
Feijóo would prefer to govern alone. But no single poll predicted the PP to win more than 156 seats in a Congress where the absolute majority stands at 176 seats. So everything depends on the large army of undecided people, who make up 15.2 percent of those entitled to vote. But also the turnout. According to experts, the main reason for the Socialists’ election debacle was the low turnout in the nationwide local elections and the twelve regional elections at the end of May.
It was all the more astonishing that Spain’s socialist head of government, in a kind of flight forward, brought the new elections forward to July 23 of all times. The country is actually in vacation mode at this time and not in election mode. Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards are already on the country’s Mediterranean shores, enjoying paellas and “tintos de verano” (red wine with lemonade) on the beach.
So it was only logical that the Spanish postal service had to hire up to 20,000 additional helpers in order to be able to process the 2.5 million applications for postal votes – twice as many as in the provisionally last parliamentary elections in 2019. So there is no sign of voting fatigue, at least in the run-up. No wonder, there is a lot at stake.
Since an absolute majority for one of the two large mainstream parties would be a surprise, there are only three possible scenarios, political expert Pablo Simón explains to APA: “New elections” or a renewed, but less likely majority of socialists and the “Sumar” link pact, which also includes the previous government partner Unidas Podemos. “Or, and this is what all the polls are predicting, an election victory for the conservatives, who, however, would depend on the right-wing populist Vox party.”
The conservatives have no parliamentary alternatives. Sánchez, on the other hand, has already made it clear that he will not support a conservative minority government, even if this means that the conservatives have to bring the right-wing extremists into government.
It is precisely this panorama that Prime Minister Sánchez was apparently looking for when he surprisingly scheduled the parliamentary elections for his own party during the Spanish summer holidays. He knew that following the local and regional elections, the Conservatives had to form coalitions with the far-right just before the start of the election campaign. And so it was in the hundreds of town halls and numerous regional governments that were formed in mid-June.
Sánchez hopes to unsettle moderate center voters and mobilize Spain’s left-wing voters with the “spectre of the shift to the right.” In fact, it would be the first time since the end of the fascist Franco dictatorship in 1975 that a far-right party would come to power in Spain.
The election campaign looked correspondingly meaningless. Almost all parties preferred to concentrate on defaming their political opponents. But not only from the socialist side. Feijóo also reduced his campaign to the simple fundamental decision “Sánchez or Spain”.
His calculations can add up. The person Sánchez is controversial in the population. Thus, Feijóo focused his attacks on Sánchez himself and his leadership style, and less on his government policies. The conservatives’ problem: “You can’t belittle Sánchez’s economic policy successes. Under Sánchez, the Spanish economy grew above the EU average. Many jobs were created, minimum wages were raised. Inflation, at just under 1.6 percent, is one of the lowest in Europe,” explains political expert Simón.
Under Sánchez, a staunch feminist who has also been showing himself on the international stage as statesmanlike EU Council President since July 1, Spain has also become the respected avant-garde in Europe in many respects when it comes to women’s rights and equality. Sánchez introduced parity in politics and business, liberalized abortion and euthanasia laws, promoted progressive transgender people and even dared to take dictator Franco out of his famous tomb in the “Valley of the Fallen” and rebury him in a conventional cemetery.
Under Sánchez, things have even calmed down in the independence conflict with the Catalans. But this is where the opposition comes in, accusing him of paying a high price to the separatists on whom Sánchez’s minority government has depended so far. Like his Catalonia policy, his socio-political successes are seen as a red rag, especially by conservative voters.
Above all, however, it is likely to be the polemical politics of his previous coalition partner, the left-wing populist Unidas Podemos, that might cost Sánchez his office. If the new left-wing party Sumar, in which Podemos has now also been merged, does not achieve a surprise victory in the elections and still be able to achieve a majority for the Spanish left-wing bloc.
Polling stations close at 20:00 CEST, in the Canary Islands at 21:00 CEST. After that, the first results are expected.
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