A Spanish gamble pays off

I’m back from holiday, in time to report on the result of yesterday’s Spanish election, in which Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez has pulled off a moral if not quite an actual victory.

As I explained two months ago, Sánchez was taking a gamble in going five months early, Spain’s fourth early election in succession. Voters usually punish the calling of unnecessary elections, but in this case Sánchez, trailing badly in the polls, was hoping “to catch the opposition off its guard and prevent it from building up any further momentum.” It seems to have worked.

The opposition People’s Party (centre-right), under new leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo, still increased its vote dramatically, to 33.1%, up 12.2% on the (second) 2019 election, and won 136 of the 350 seats (up 47). But that put it only narrowly ahead of Sánchez’s Socialists – which also gained votes, up 3.7% to 31.7%, and won 122 seats (up two) – and was a long way short of the majority it had hoped for. (See official results here.*)

More significant are the overall left and right votes. Feijóo’s far-right potential ally, Vox, dropped 2.7% and 19 seats to finish with 12.4% and 33 seats. That kept it in third place, but only just; the new far-left party Sumar was less than 20,000 votes behind, with 12.3% and 31 seats (down from the combined 15.3% and 38 seats won by Podemos and Más País last time). So the combined right has 169 seats – or 170 with the single representative of the Navarrese People’s Union – against 153 for the left, with 176 needed for a majority.

Citizens, the centrist party that won ten seats last time, has disappeared, so the balance of power is again held by regionalist parties, mostly Basque and Catalan (two of each, notionally left and centre). Although their vote was down (especially in Catalonia), their bargaining position has improved: they now hold Sánchez by the throat, and are the only thing standing between Spain and a government that opens the door to the far right.

The only regionalist likely to deal with the right is the single Canary Islander, which would bring the right’s total to 171. If Sánchez can enlist the two Basque parties (11 seats, six left and five centre), the left-wing Catalans (seven seats) and the single Galician, that would put him ahead by the narrowest of margins, with 172 seats.

The remaining seven seats belong to Together for Catalonia, centrist but strongly pro-independence, which has been a consistent opponent of the Sánchez government. If it could be persuaded to abstain, and if everything else held together, the government would be able to win a vote of confidence. It would be too precarious to be able to carry on for very long, but even a few months might be enough to change the political landscape.

There isn’t much in the way of alternatives. The Basques and Catalans won’t deal with Vox under any circumstances, so if the Socialists are unable to continue there will have to be either some understanding between centre-left and centre-right, or else a fresh election. The former is not impossible (it’s what ultimately emerged from the 2016 election, although it didn’t last), but no-one sounds enthusiastic about it; the latter might give Feijóo a workable majority, but it might not.

Sánchez, however, may well be reluctant to pay a high price to the Catalans to retain office; not only would this be unpopular in the rest of the country, but it comes at a time when opinion in Catalonia itself seems to have turned firmly against independence. The three solidly anti-independence parties (Socialists, People’s Party and Vox) won 55.6% of the Catalan vote between them (plus another 14.0% for Sumar, which is more equivocal), leaving the regionalist parties in their worst position since the current push for independence began more than a decade ago.

This was part of a general swing back to the major parties, whose combined 64.8% of the vote was their best result since 2011. Feijóo’s cautious attempts to delegitimise the far right seem to have had some success. But he has been unable – so far, at least – to combine that with a project of winning government with its support.

Sánchez, on the other hand, in the words of Carlos Cué at El País, “has achieved something that seemed impossible less than two months ago, when he decided to take the umpteenth leap into the void …”.

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* Note that the official results factor out invalid ballots but not blank ballots before calculating percentages, which to my mind is inexplicable, but the differences are only small so I have not bothered to recalculate them.