The last time Spain went to the polls – in November 2019 – the cover of the satirical magazine El Jueves showed a manic and sweating Pedro Sánchez hunched over a fruit machine, desperately hoping that his gamble of calling the second general election of the year would pay off. It did.
Four years later, however, the stakes were even higher for Spain’s socialist prime minister, for his country – and for Europe. Sánchez, a politician known for his willingness to take chances, surprised everyone at the end of May when he reacted to his party’s poor showing in regional and local elections by calling a snap general election.
Rather than endure months of uncertainty and further damage to the minority government he runs in coalition with the far-left Unidas Podemos alliance, he rolled the dice and decided to make Sunday’s election a binary choice between left and right.
Sánchez’s message to voters was clear: it was time to choose between a progressive Spain – as represented by his Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE) and its allies in the new leftwing Sumar alliance – and the combined reactionary forces of the conservative People’s party (PP) and its sometime allies in the far-right Vox party. The prime minister’s case has been further bolstered over recent weeks by the PP’s willingness to forge new coalitions with Vox to govern regions including Valencia and Extremadura.
Vox, which was founded by discontented PP members a decade ago, won its first seats in Spain’s congress in 2019, its ultra-nationalist appeal suddenly burnished by its angry and vocal opposition to the issue of Catalan independence. The party, which has long hoped to emulate the success of its far-right peers in other European countries – including Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy – denies human-made climate change and gender-based violence and is virulently anti-immigrant.
Although Vox has never attempted to hide its views, and has amply achieved its aim of bringing them into the political mainstream, it has been embraced by the supposedly “moderate” PP, led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo. And that, according to Sánchez, is precisely where the danger lurks.
“A few months ago, a European leader told me the Spanish election is very important, because if things swing towards a PP-Vox government, the balances within Europe will be upset,” the prime minister told El País towards the end of June.
“There’s something that’s far more dangerous than Vox, and that’s having a PP that assumes the policies and postures of Vox. And that’s what we’re seeing: a denialism when it comes to social, political and scientific consensus.”
A recent poll found that more than 60% of Spaniards were worried about the prospect of a coalition government that included Vox.
The Ipsos poll, conducted for Spain’s La Vanguardia newspaper, found that 42.1% of those surveyed were very worried by the idea of Vox sharing power with the conservative People’s party (PP), while 18% were quite worried. It also found that 26% of respondents were very worried by the idea of a PSOE-Sumar government.
As the survey shows, just as the notion of the far right in power disgusts Spanish progressives, so the idea of another leftwing government repels some conservative voters, especially if it continues to rely on the support of pro-independence Basque and Catalan parties in parliament.
As well as lambasting the Sánchez administration for its botched sexual offences reforms – which have led to more than 100 convicted sex offenders granted early release – the PP and Vox accuse it of being in hock to the Catalan nationalists who tried to secede from the rest of Spain six years ago, and to Basque politicians with links to the defunct terrorist group Eta.
The campaign for May’s elections was dominated by the legacy of Eta after it emerged that the Basque nationalist party, EH Bildu – whose support the Sánchez government has enlisted in congress – was fielding 44 convicted Eta members, including seven people found guilty of violent crimes, as candidates.
Sánchez criticised Bildu’s decision – describing it as legal but “obviously indecent” – but it was swiftly seized on by his opponents.
“You’re the great electoral hope for rapists and pederasts, for mutineers, squatters, corrupt people, and now for those who used to go about in balaclavas with pistols,” Feijóo told Sánchez. “And I will never be that.”
That polarisation, discord and fury have been the defining features of Spain’s volatile and rapidly changing politics over the past few years.
When Sánchez points to the relatively good state of the Spanish economy and his government’s introduction of menstrual leave, a euthanasia law, a minimum basic income scheme and the updating of abortion legislation, his opponents point to the sexual consent debacle, his deals with the parties they see as the enemies of Spain, and to what the PP calls sanchismo – a cynical, opportunistic political creed which, in their eyes, exists only to cling to power.
Now that Spain has gone to the polls for the fifth time in eight years, results suggest an electorate finely divided, and Sánchez will soon learn whether his latest bet was the right one.
