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Date Published: 28/07/2023

PP wins most votes in Spanish election but result is not clear

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Centre-right party wins most seats and votes but may still lose out to left-wing alliance

PP wins most votes in Spanish election but result is not clear

The conservative party in Spain, the Partido Popular (PP), have won the most votes and the most seats in Congress in the general election held this weekend, but they did not reach an absolute majority and so will need to join with minority parties to be able to form a government.

The PP, headed by party leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo, won 136 seats, 47 more than it did in the last election in 2019 but did not win enough to meet the required majority of 176 seats and so govern alone. Now they must decide whether they will make a pact with other parties to be able to form a coalition government.

This would most likely mean an alliance with the third-place far-right VOX party – which didn’t perform as well in these elections as many expected them to, winning 33 seats, 19 fewer seats than they won in 2019 – plus other smaller parties which don’t take too kindly to VOX’s brand of nationalism. If such a coalition government were to be formed, it would be the first time Spain has had a government of the extreme right since the death of the dictator Franco and the introduction of democracy almost 50 years ago.

President for the last five years, Pedro Sánchez, came second with his centre-left PSOE party, though it was a closer-run thing than the polls suggested it would be.

Feijóo has formally requested that the other parties concede that he has won and not block his route to power, but Sánchez looks unlikely to relent and will try to cling onto the presidency, claiming that the closeness of the results gives him the right to a mandate.

In order to continue to govern despite not coming first, Sánchez and his Socialists will need to form a coalition government with the far-left Sumar party and other smaller local independence parties such as the Basque EH Bildu. They must also rely on the main Catalan Independence party, Junts, to at least abstain – something they say they will not do in return for nothing.

PSOE gained 122 seats, two more than in 2019, while the fledgling far-left Sumar got 31, seven fewer than Unidas Podemos, Más País and Compromís, its forerunners from which it was created.

Now comes a period of negotiation in which the parties will talk in backrooms to decide the fate of the future government.

The election results indicate that Spanish voters seem to have drifted back to the centre ground once again rather than voting for parties on the extreme end of the political spectrum, a trend that had been seen in Spanish politics since the creation of Podemos in 2014.

Nonetheless, there will still be a need for a coalition government now, in a further example of the European tendency towards a diffusion of the political landscape and more collaborative forms of party-led representative democracy.

Another possibility of what happens next is that there are more elections at the end of this year if the parties cannot reach an accord to govern by September 8.

As well as accusations that some people were unable to cast a postal vote correctly due to the ineptitude of the Correos Spanish post office, election day was also marred by travel disruptions on trains between Madrid and Valencia which meant that some people were reportedly unable to reach their allotted voting table in time.

Image: @NunezFeijoo/Twitter

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