Depending on how you look at the result of yesterday’s general election in Spain, either everyone won or no one won. It had been called five months early by outgoing Socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez, who hoped to block a resurgent Spanish right after its emphatic victories in regional elections on 28 May.
The vote drew 70.4 per cent of the population to the polls, 4.2 per cent more than in 2019. This was a surprisingly high turnout for the middle of summer, when a lot of Spaniards are either on holiday or sheltering from the intense heat.
Prolonged political freezes, sleep-walking governments and prop-up arrangements have become the norm
The Conservative Popular party (PP) came first, winning 33.1 per cent of the vote and 136 seats in the national congress, up from the 89 it secured in 2019. The PSOE, Sanchez’s party, came second with 31.7 per cent and upped its seats by two to 122, a much stronger result than many pundits were expecting. Third place went to right wing Vox, which lost 19 of its 52 seats on 12.4 per cent of the vote (disappointing for a party that made big gains in the regional elections on 28 May); right behind it, with 12.3 per cent and 31 seats, came Sumar, a constellation of fifteen leftist parties not yet six months old.
No possible coalition – either on the right with the PP and Vox or on the left with the PSOE and Sumar – would possess a majority of 176 seats, meaning that months of negotiations are now likely to follow. If these fail to yield a government, there will likely be another general election before the end of 2023, which would be the fifth since 2015.
None of this is new. From the death of fascist dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 until just under eight years ago, Spain’s political scene was dominated by the Socialists and the PP. But in the general election of December 2015, the leftist Podemos party (formerly the junior partner in Sanchez’s coalition, now a member of Sumar) and the centrist Ciudadanos party exploded that two-party setup.
Since then, prolonged political freezes, sleep-walking governments and prop-up arrangements have become the norm. Things stalled to such an extent in 2016 that the country went without a functioning government for 313 days. With the exception of a precocious performance by leftist newbie Sumar, yesterday’s election represents more of the same.
As leader of the winning party in yesterday’s vote, PP president Albert Feijoo now has the first shot at forming the next Spanish government. His only hope of forming an almost-majority of 169 seats depends on collaboration with Vox, which has already entered into coalitions with the Conservatives in Valencia, Extremadura and Castilla y Leon.
But even if Vox and the PP come to an arrangement at the national level, it’s not obvious that they could depend on leftist Catalan and Basque separatists to the extent that Sanchez has been able to. It might be a step too far for the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC, down six seats) to give its votes to a coalition government containing Vox, which has promised to outlaw Catalan separatist groups if it seizes national power.
Yet a PP-Vox coalition wouldn’t be able to function without an informal prop-up arrangement. Sanchez’s last administration, a coalition with Podemos, was 21 seats short of a majority; only with the votes of Basque and Catalan nationalists and the occasional abstention was it able to pass a record-setting budget, reform sexual assault legislation, enact labour market reforms and introduce a ‘historical memory’ law to aid the families of victims of Franco. In Spain, parliamentary majorities are a luxury rather than a necessity – but only if you have allies further down the supply chain.
In the negotiations now only just beginning, parties such as the ERC and EH Bildu, a pro-independence Basque group (up one seat), will become kingmakers, a position that was once occupied by Ciudadanos. One of the anti-establishment upstarts of 2015, opposite its leftist rival Podemos, Ciudadanos enjoyed runaway initial success. It has, however, performed so badly in recent elections that it didn’t even contest yesterday’s, a no-show from which the PP – and to a lesser extent Vox – benefited considerably.
Although Feijoo’s PP has secured victory for the right, it’s far from certain that he’ll head the next Spanish government – but that’s the price to pay for inhabiting such a colourful and interesting political landscape.
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