Prime minister Pedro Sánchez will be fighting three battles at once when Spain goes to the polls on Sunday 23 July after a hot, short-tempered summer campaign. Whether Sánchez, leader of the social democratic Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE), can pull off an improbable hat-trick will shape not only Spain’s future trajectory but also potentially that of Europe as a whole.
First, Sánchez must save his own political career. His surprise decision to call a general election six months early, after his coalition’s drubbing in May’s local polls, was daring, even possibly self-defeating. Most politicians would have hung on, hoping for a shift in public mood. But like a matador challenging an angry bull, Sánchez waved his capote at voters and said, in effect: “Back me or sack me.”
Second, Sánchez’s PSOE and Sumar, a newly unified alliance of leftwing, hard-left and green parties led by the popular Labour minister Yolanda Díaz, must defeat a resurgent centre-right People’s party (PP). It’s a moving target.
The PP is averaging a six-point poll lead, putting it within striking distance of victory – assuming its leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, can find acceptable allies of his own.
Which brings Sánchez to his final, more widely significant battle – or, as bullfighters say, tercio de muerte (third act of the death): the struggle, mirrored across Europe, to slay the “post-fascist” far right, which in its anti-migrant xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia and regressive social attitudes very much recalls the fascism of old.
In Spain, a land of long memories despite its “pact of forgetting”, that means the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, who died in 1975.
As matters stand, the far-right Vox, the third-largest party and Francoist tribute act, could win sufficient votes – it is now on 14% – to help Feijóo’s PP, with its projected 34% national share, gain a winning margin.
With Sánchez’s PSOE on an estimated 28% and Díaz’s Sumar on 13%, Vox is a likely kingmaker. Its price for backing the PP is power. If successful, it would mark the first time the far right has held national office since the Franco era.
Santiago Abascal, Vox’s leader, says Sánchez’s “social-communist” coalition is worse than anything the caudillo ever imposed on Spain. Yet Vox seems fairly keen on Franco-style diktats. It wants to ban Catalan and Basque separatist parties, for example, and erect walls round Spain’s north African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla to deter migrants.
Like Giorgia Meloni’s ruling Brothers of Italy, a close ally, Vox is hostile to LGBTQ+ rights and gender equality. Vox councillors are suspected of censorship – and of trying to rebury the past. The party wants to repeal the landmark 2007 law of historical memory, which offered reparations to victims of the civil war and later repression, and declared Franco’s regime illegitimate.
Abascal accuses Sánchez of “lying to the Spanish people and making deals with the enemies of democracy” – a reference to coalition cooperation with separatist parties. Opposition criticism of the government focuses on the rising cost of living, strict pandemic lockdowns, migration and a controversial sexual consent law.
For his part, Sánchez accuses Abascal and Feijóo of trying to “put us in a time machine and take us back to who knows where” – meaning the fascist era. Vox is already in coalition with the PP at regional and municipal level. Sánchez’s belief that voters will recoil in horror from a national Vox-PP pact supposedly explains his decision to call early elections. It’s plainly a gamble.
Sánchez’s potential saviour, Díaz of Sumar, puts the choice more starkly still. “On 23 July, Spain will decide between two kinds of government – two coalitions,” she said at a recent campaign appearance. “The coalition of rights, freedom and progress – a coalition of us and the Socialist party – and the coalition of hatred, which rejects the rights of women and LGBT people, and which pits businesses against workers.”
This latest, passionate war of the Spanish succession has obvious, broader relevance. Spain holds the EU presidency. Brussels is understandably nervous about importing the far right. A Vox triumph would reverberate loudly across Europe. And the fight against authoritarianism, bigotry and intolerance is global. “Spaniards need to decide if they want a government on the side of Biden or Trump,” Sánchez warned.
“The PSOE has kept social democracy a viable political force in Spain at a time when it has struggled for relevance elsewhere in western Europe,” analyst Omar Encarnación noted. “While social democratic parties in Italy, France, and Germany have in recent years either collapsed or become shadows of their former selves, the PSOE has thrived.” But is that era drawing to a close in Spain, too?
Díaz, a lifelong communist, believes in the need for more radical approaches – and in taking the fight to the right – if the democratic left is to prevail in Spain and elsewhere. She’s pledged to prioritise the climate emergency, introduce a shorter working week and improve social mobility by offering universal financial grants to 18-year-olds.
Strong support for the hard-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon in last year’s French presidential contest shows that Díaz is not alone in seeking a more fundamental change. Others in Germany and the UK suffering far-right blight – and seeking robust remedies – will watch closely to see whether Sánchez’s traditional social democratic model survives this latest reactionary onslaught.
It’s much the same story across the western world.
As stressed and divided electorates turn on themselves, the extreme, anti-democratic forces of reaction, control and repression exploit the fissures.
It will be a close-run thing. But who knows? Perhaps Sánchez can buck the trend.
