Spain faces uncertain leadership affairs after 2023 general election deadlock

VAM News Update

THE past week observers of Spain’s election have focused on the prospect of the hard right entering government, for the first time since the return of democracy in 1978. That, as it turned out, was not the main story.

As the last votes were being counted on Sunday night, the right- and left-wing blocs were virtually tied—and neither had a clear path to assembling a majority and installing a government. The right-wing bloc, led by the centre-right People’s Party (pp), came first as predicted.

The pp took 136 of 350 seats. But polls had predicted it would get close to 150. Added to the 33 seats of the hard-right Vox party, that fell short of the 176 needed for a majority.

The big surprise was the outperformance of Mr Sánchez’s Socialists. Instead of being punished as polls had predicted, the party looked set to gain a couple of seats, finishing with 122. Its preferred coalition partner, the far-left Sumar party, won 31.

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Spain was facing an uncertain political future on Monday as the right and left failed to secure a clear path to forming a government even though the opposition People’s party won the most seats in parliament.

The deadlock leaves the EU’s fourth-largest economy in limbo and opens the door to weeks or months of messy negotiations over voting alliances — or repeat elections, as occurred in 2015-16 and 2019.

Defying the odds, Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez put up enough resistance to prevent Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s PP from securing a conservative parliamentary majority in alliance with the hard-right Vox party.

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Although Sánchez’s party did better than polls had forecast and won two more seats than in 2019, he fell short of the outright majority needed to take office even with the support of his existing allies.

On Monday, the PP amplified its pleas to Sánchez to let Feijóo form a minority government, even though the prime minister is unlikely to accede. “The fundamental objective must be to form a government that provides stability,” said Borja Sémper, Feijóo’s spokesperson. “If not, the alternative is that the loser [Sánchez] tries to form a government, something unprecedented in Spanish democratic history.”

On Sunday night, a jubilant Sánchez told supporters outside his party headquarters that “the reactionary bloc of the People’s party and Vox have been defeated”.