Not a good night for Spanish Socialists

by Guy Hedgecoe, Madrid

Although Pedro Sánchez's [Spanish] Socialists have emerged as winners having suffered only slight losses in this election, the overall result is not a positive one for the acting prime minister.

With Podemos having lost some ground and Más País securing only a handful of seats, there is no clear left-wing majority.  The Socialists' arch-rivals on the right, the PP, have recovered many of the seats they lost in April's ballot.

If the country's longstanding political stalemate is to be broken, Mr Sánchez might have to seek the support of the PP [centre right], or else a third election in the space of one year could beckon.
Meanwhile, the huge surge by the nationalist Vox party makes it the country's third political force and it will now find it easier to set the agenda on the right. That is likely to hinder any attempts by Mr Sánchez to seek a conciliatory solution to the Catalan crisis.

The April election ended in deadlock, with parties failing to form a coalition by a September deadline, thus forcing Sunday's election.


To form a coalition now, they would need to form alliances with smaller, nationalist parties, analysts suggest.

Meanwhile, the PP and Vox could seek to make the most of their gains.

One PP politician said Prime Minister Sánchez should "start to think about going", given the early results.

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Catalan News: Pro-independence ERC party's win

IT was a historic general election for the pro-independence Esquerra party (ERC), which increased its number of seats to a record 15 in the Spanish parliament.

Winning six more seats than in it did in the last general election in June 2016, it is the first time since the 1930s that ERC has come first among the Catalan parties.

With the Junts per Catalunya party (JxCat) coming in with seven seats (one less than the last election), it means the pro-independence bloc in the Congress has an unprecedented 22 seats.

This could be significant, as Pedro Sánchez's Socialists, who won the election with 123 seats, may need the support of the pro-independence bloc to form a government.

Next among the parties in Catalonia came the Catalan Socialists (PSC), who went up five seats to 12, although the leftwing En Comú Podem party (ECP) was unable to maintain its good showing from three years ago, dropping from 12 seats to seven.

The unionist Ciutadans party (Cs) held on to its five seats, while the also unionist People's Party (PPC) lost five seats, dropping to just one.

It was also an historic night for the far-right Vox party, which entered parliament for the first time with one seat in Catalonia, and a further 23 in the Spanish wing of the party.

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Broken Politics on the Iberian Penisular

 by Brian Bamford

BROKEN-up politics has characterised Spain since the successful rise of Podemos and the Citizen's Ciudadanos party in the 2015 election.  After that the two-party system was over.  Now with the far right VOX party gaining 24 seats in yesterday's elections there is a real fragmentation in political life which mirrors events elsewhere in Europe.

This election came less than a year after Spain’s then prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, was defeated in a vote of no confidence owing to corruption in his Popular Party.  The leader of the socialist party (PSOE), Pedro Sanchez, then formed a minority government with the help of the Catalan separatists, leading his critics to accuse him of being too friendly with the independentistas.  

  

However, Sanchez was unable to hold this informal coalition together and last February he called a snap general election when he was unable to get a national budget through the Cortes parliament when the Catalan nationalists witheld their support owing to the problems over Catalan independence.

The issues of independence, identity and Spanish unity flavoured the election.  And yet, the most significant consequence of these elections was the fragmentation of the right and the centre right.  The most damaged party in these elections has been the conservative Popular Party, which has lost votes to both the far Right VOX and the more centrist Ciudadanos Citizen's party.

  Catalan Independence

The Catalan independence conflict originally came to a crisis in October 2017 when the Catalan separatists held an unconstitutional independence referendum, which drew 40% of eligible voters but saw a 90% vote to secede.  Three weeks later, Carles Puigdemont, the region’s president at the time, declared independence — leading to Spain’s deepest constitutional crisis since its return to democracy.

As a result, the Spanish government, then led by the Popular Party, fired the Catalan parliament, wrested control of the region, began arresting the movement’s leaders and called for fresh regional elections.

While separatists criticized the government for cracking down, some on the right argued the Popular Party was too soft on the independentistas.

Fragmentation of the Right

Consequently some Popular Party voters turned to VOX, which seeks to suppress regional autonomy in Catalonia.  A xenophobic party VOX echoes Franco’s nationalist rhetoric and follows the populist trend seen in recent years across Europe, stoking fear of immigrants and demonizing feminists.

On the other hand some other former Partido Popular voters seem to have drifted towards the centrist Citizen's Ciudadanos party.

The Catalan crisis and the rise of Vox have changed the debate in Spanish politics.
'This is not an election about the economy - a different situation from what we have seen in more than 20 years,' says Juan Rodríguez Teruel, professor of political science at the University of Valencia.

Despite widespread concerns about unemployment - which remains high in Spain compared with its European neighbours - it barely featured during the campaign and was raised during the debates only briefly

But Prof Teruel warns that the surge for Vox is coming at the expense of other right-leaning parties - the PP or Ciudadanos. And for the first time since the 1970s, the right is 'very fragmented' - something that could benefit opponents on the left.

'The main reason now to vote for the left-wing electorate is to avoid the potential coalition among right-wing parties,' Prof Teruel says. 
 
Ciudadanos, meanwhile, could feasibly support a coalition with the Socialists, despite publicly dismissing the idea.

'I'm not sure they could keep this position if the numbers give the potential of a coalition,' Prof Teruel says.

'The pressure on Ciudadanos will be very, very high.'

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