Given largely winning for months by all the polls, the Spanish right is only narrowly ahead of the Socialists of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on Sunday evening.
The People’s Party, representing the right-wing opposition in Spain, won the legislative elections this Sunday, but did not obtain an absolute majority against the Socialist Party of outgoing Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, according to data published by the daily. El Paisafter the counting of more than 98% of the votes.
At 10:20 p.m., the Ministry of the Interior projected 132 seats for the PP and 127 for the Socialists, who are holding up much better than all the polls carried out in recent days (and whose publication was prohibited by law) predicted.
In third place, the far-right Vox party was credited with 33 seats, just ahead of Sumar, a radical left party allied with Pedro Sanchez, which would have 30 seats. Even with the support of Vox, Albert Nunez Feijoo’s PP would therefore only have 165 seats, far from an absolute majority, which is 176 seats.
Towards a huge surprise?
On the other hand, the left bloc, with potentially 157 seats, seemed in a paradoxically better position to stay in power thanks to the support of several small Basque and Catalan formations which could bring it the 19 seats it lacks to reach an absolute majority.
Such an outcome would be a huge surprise, all the polls having given the Socialists beaten since their rout in the municipal and regional elections of May 28, which had convinced Pedro Sanchez to dissolve the assembly and call early elections in the middle of summer.
There is no exit poll in Spain, but all the polls carried out during the last days of the campaign, and which were made public on Sunday when the polls closed, gave a fairly wide victory for the PP, with around 140 seats, and predicted that it would approach or even exceed an absolute majority.
“A new era”
Albert Nunez Feijoo said after voting that he hoped Spain would “start a new era”, but everything seemed to indicate that he would not achieve his goal. This election is “very important (…) for the world and for Europe”, had estimated, for his part, the outgoing Prime Minister, the socialist Pedro Sanchez, in power for five years.
The poll has sparked unusual interest abroad due to the possible rise to power of an alliance between the mainstream right and Vox, an ultra-nationalist, ultra-conservative and Europhobic party that rejects the existence of gender violence, criticizes “climate fanaticism” and is openly anti-LGBT and anti-abortion.
Such a scenario, which now seems very unlikely, would have marked 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.
Source: BFM TV
