Towards the end of last month, María Guardiola, who leads the conservative People’s party (PP) in the Extremadura region of south-west Spain, gave a speech in which she tore into the far-right Vox party for its denial of gender-based violence, its demonisation of migrants and its attacks on the LGBTQ+ community.
Guardiola was far from alone in her aversion to Vox’s views and tactics. The party’s most recent stunt in the run-up to Spain’s general election this Sunday – which could put the far right in government for the first time since the return to democracy after the Franco dictatorship – had been the unveiling in Madrid of a massive banner showing a giant hand tossing symbols representing feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, Catalan independence, environmental programmes and communism into a bin.
But what made Guardiola’s stance different was the fact her party had recently cut a deal to rule the Valencia region in coalition with Vox – and that to have any chance of governing Extremadura after finishing second in May’s regional election, she would have to rely on the party’s support.
Guardiola was having none of it and said she would be prepared to stand in a repeat of the regional elections rather than countenance any deals with Vox, adding that her word was all she had. “I can’t allow those who deny gender-based violence … those who are dehumanising immigrants and those who unfurl a banner chucking the LGBTI flag into the bin into government,” she insisted.
Yet on Monday this week, Guardiola was sworn in as Extremadura’s president after forming a coalition with Vox and deciding that, on reflection, “my word isn’t as important as the future of the people of Extremadura”.
It was not the first time that the PP – which could well form a national coalition government with Vox if, as expected, it falls short of an absolute majority on Sunday – has tied itself up in knots over its relationship with the far-right party.
In October 2020, the PP’s then leader, Pablo Casado – whose party had relied on Vox’s support to prop up three of its regional governments – finally eviscerated the far-right outfit for being populists who peddled “easy – and usually fake – solutions to complex problems”. Unlike Vox, added Casado, the PP didn’t want to be “another party of fear, of rage, of resentment and revenge, of insults and skirmishes, nor of manipulation, lies and backwards opposition”.
Less than two years later, the PP brushed aside such reservations and formed its first coalition regional government with Vox in Castilla y León. Given the precedents and the pragmatic nature of Spanish politics, few people on the streets of Guardiola’s home town of Cáceres were taken aback by her sudden U-turn.
“Why did Guardiola change her mind?” asked one local man, rhetorically. “Because the PP told her to.”
Concha, a self-confessed “textbook social democrat” who had taken her grandson to a park not far from Cáceres’s imposing main square, was also far from stunned. “It wasn’t a surprise that Guardiola did the deal – it was only logical that she’d make a deal, because you don’t want to lose out on governing,” she said.
While she wasn’t too bothered by Guardiola’s decision to hand Vox the regional ministry for forest management, hunting and fishing, Concha said the party should not be allowed to influence environmental and farming policy, “because of their denial of climate change”.
Others in Extremadura were more forthright. “The PP have chucked Guardiola under the bus; they’ve sold her out and they’ve humiliated her,” said Irene de Miguel, the leader of the leftwing Podemos party in the region. “They’ve made her go back on her word when she came out and said that her word was all she had. So if she doesn’t have her word any more, what does she have? Nothing.”
De Miguel said that rather than tackling housing, employment, depopulation and the region’s energy economy, the new PP-Vox administration was focusing on culture war issues, such as repealing the Democratic Memory Law and an ideological scrutiny of what children are taught in Extremadura’s schools.
She also noted the PP’s national leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, had repeatedly insisted that the party that won the largest share of the votes should be allowed to govern. In Extremadura, that party was the Spanish Socialist Workers party (PSOE) of the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez.
“Feijóo has been saying again and again that the party that wins the most votes should be allowed to govern. It’s totally contradictory for Guardiola to be invested here with Vox’s votes because she didn’t win the most votes,” De Miguel said.
Despite supposedly seeking to reclaim the centre ground since he became the party’s leader last year, Feijóo and some of his entourage have shown themselves more than willing to cut deals with Vox and to use the kind of tactics more beloved of populist leaders than self-proclaimed moderates.
During a recent interview with Spain’s state broadcaster, RTVE, Feijóo refused to accept his claims about his party’s record on pension levels were incorrect and instead asked the journalist, Silvia Intxaurrondo, to apologise and to issue a correction to her claims. But Intxaurrondo’s statements were borne out by the facts and Feijóo eventually conceded that there had been “inaccuracies” in his claims.
However, one of Feijóo’s key allies, the MEP Esteban González Pons, accused RTVE of backing Sánchez’s PSOE and called on its directors to resign if the PP won the election. His words were swiftly condemned by Spain’s main press association.
Last week Feijóo also appeared to cast doubt on the impartiality of Spain’s postal service when he called on postal workers “to deliver all the votes, independently of their bosses”. Postal votes have taken on a new importance in this election as many Spaniards will be on holiday for the snap summer poll.
José Pablo Ferrándiz, the head of public opinion and political research at Ipsos Spain, said that while the polls remained relatively close, the right had a highly motivated electorate on its side.
“We’ve been seeing a hyper-mobilised right for a long time now and a left that was very demobilised according to the polls, but which we thought would reactivate as the election approached,” he said. “Demobilisation affects the left much more than the right – especially voters on the centre left. I think it’s going to be very hard for the left to mobilise those voters in the time left, so the right is pretty much guaranteed to win, irrespective of whether it gets an absolute majority or not.”
Ferrándiz said centre-right voters who might once have been put off voting for the PP because of its alliances with Vox would probably vote for the PP because such pacts had become normalised – and because the alternative would be a PSOE coalition with the far-left Sumar alliance, perhaps propped up by the votes of Basque and Catalan pro-independence parties.
“At the end of the day, they may not like the deals with Vox, but it’s the least bad option [for them].”
