An internal war has broken out at the top of Spain’s far-right Vox party after its poor showing in last month’s general election when it lost nearly half of the seats it won in 2019.
Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, a founder member and the party’s spokesperson, resigned on Tuesday, saying he would not be taking up his seat in parliament.
Espinosa de los Monteros, who said he was leaving to spend more time with his family, has been increasingly marginalised by hardliners close to the party leader, Santiago Abascal. While they look for inspiration to the authoritarian government of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and the rightwing nationalists of Law & Justice in Poland, Espinosa de los Monteros represents a wing of the party that identifies more with the British Conservatives and whose role models are Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
“I believe it’s more of an internal power struggle than anything to do with ideology because there is little ideological difference between them,” said Pablo Simón, a political scientist at the University Carlos III in Madrid.
Simón believes the infighting has been caused by frustration that, despite winning virtually the same percentage of the vote as the leftwing Sumar (Unite) party, Vox has no chance of being in government, while Sumar does.
Amid internal recriminations over the party’s collapse, the mainstream conservative People’s party (PP) has also been distancing itself from Vox. The PP, which had been expected in the run-up to the election to form a coalition with Vox, emerged as overall winner but is now unable to form a government.
By aligning itself with the far right, the PP has banished any hope of a coalition with conservative Basque and Catalan nationalists, who have supported minority PP governments in the past but will not countenance entering into a coalition that includes Vox.
Next week, Pedro Sánchez, the acting prime minister and Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE) leader, will attempt to stay in his job by winning a vote in the parliament that requires an absolute majority of 176 of the 350 seats.
As he has no overall majority, this is likely to go to a second vote 48 hours later, when only a simple majority is required. However, he will still need the votes of Junts per Catalunya (Together for Catalonia), the conservative nationalist party led by the former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont.
After nearly six years of self-imposed exile in Belgium, Puigdemont had been fading into irrelevance before the election, which has given him an opportunity to return to the limelight. However, his demands – for an amnesty for all those charged in relation to the illegal 2017 declaration of independence and for a binding referendum on Catalan independence – are politically impossible for Sánchez to accept.
If Sánchez cannot form a government this month, Spain will go to the polls again in December, the sixth general election in seven years.
