Spain goes early

Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez surprised everyone overnight by announcing that his country would go to the polls five months early: the general election that was expected in December will instead be held on 23 July. The decision came after big opposition gains in regional elections held on Sunday.

Twelve of Spain’s 17 regions, or “autonomous communities”, voted on Sunday [link added] for regional parliaments. Sánchez’s Socialists were previously in government in nine of the twelve, and supported a regionalist government in a tenth, Cantabria. The opposition People’s Party (centre-right) governed in only two, Madrid and Murcia.*

Now that position has been almost reversed. The People’s Party has seized control of a further six regions – Aragon, the Balearic Islands, Cantabria, Extremadura, La Rioja and Valencia – leaving regionalists with the balance of power in another two, the Canary Islands and Navarre. Only in Asturias and Castille-La Mancha did the Socialists manage to hang on. (El País has comprehensive results.)

So the tide is clearly running against Sánchez. By going early, he hopes to catch the opposition off its guard and prevent it from building up any further momentum. But he has very little margin to spare; his victory in the (quite unnecessary) second election of 2019 was only narrow, and polling over the last year has him trailing the centre-right by several points.

To see why Sánchez might still think he has a chance, note two things about the regional elections. Firstly, the Socialist vote held up reasonably well: the party actually got small swings in its favor in Asturias, Cantabria, Castilla-La Mancha and Valencia, and went backwards only slightly in some of the others. Its bigger problem was the sharp drop in the far-left vote, with its coalition partner Podemos losing about half its vote and dropping out of many of the regional parliaments.

At the national level, however, Podemos is in the process of being supplanted by a new broad left alliance, Sumar (“Unite”). If that fulfils its early promise it may allow Sánchez’s government to recover some ground in that direction and present more of a co-ordinated approach.

The other thing to look at is where the votes on the right have gone. Although the People’s Party has increased its vote across the board – dealing another blow to the “death of the centre-right” thesis – Madrid was the only region where it won a majority in its own right. Elsewhere it will depend, whether formally or not, on the support of the far-right party, Vox, whose vote also jumped dramatically.

The prime minister’s strategy seems to be to turn [link added] the election into a referendum on collaboration with the far right. Does a country that within living memory was torn apart by a fascist rebellion really want to admit Vox to a share of power? The new People’s Party leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, is more moderate on the issue than his predecessor, Pablo Casado, but it will be difficult for him to avoid being put on the spot.

A stark warning of what can happen is the fate of the other major party going into Sunday’s election, Citizens. Citizens started as a centrist party, able to do deals with both centre-left and centre-right, but its dogmatic opposition to Catalan autonomy gradually led it into more explicit co-operation with the right, including a three-way agreement in Andalusia in 2018 that also included the far right.

Its liberal voters started to abandon it, and on Sunday it was wiped out, winning only a handful of votes (2.4% in Cantabria was its best score) and losing all of its remaining representatives. That leaves a big gap in the centre of the spectrum, which Sánchez and Feijóo will now be competing to fill. It’s going to be an interesting few weeks.

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* Although it also governs in three of the five regions that weren’t voting this time around (Andalusia, Castille & Leon and Galicia), which are among Spain’s biggest.