Spain deals in the far right

I’ve promised to try not to talk about the Australian Liberal Party for a while, so instead let’s have a look at Spain. (Careful readers might notice that there are some interesting parallels.)

Spain’s largest region, Andalusia, went to the polls on Sunday. This was the last in a sequence of four regional elections, including also Extremadura last December, Aragon in February and Castille & Leon in March. Extremadura and Aragon were early elections caused by the breakup of their governing coalitions, while the other two were regular scheduled elections, since they are out of sync with the four-year cycle of most Spanish regions, which last voted in May of 2023.

We had a look at Castille & Leon at the time: there, the centre-right People’s Party, which had been returned as the largest party at the previous election but without an overall majority, had gone into coalition with the far-right party, Vox. Although the coalition broke up in 2024 the centre-right continued as a minority government, and the election failed to alter the arithmetic. No new government has yet been formed, but in one form or another it will continue to depend upon Vox.

Extremadura and Aragon both had the same sort of coalition, which also ended when Vox walked out in 2024. After persevering for a time in a minority, the premier in each case decided on an early election to try to win a majority. And they got the same result: Vox increased its vote, and although the centre-right remained the largest party, it emerged more rather than less dependent on the far right. In each case the two reassembled a coalition, although no-one knows how long it might last.

Andalusia was the odd one out in that its People’s Party had last time succeeded in winning a majority, after the collapse of a coalition with Vox in 2021. But in Spain’s new multi-party environment that’s a difficult trick to pull off twice, and on Sunday it fell short. It maintained its vote well, dropping just 1.5% to 41.6%, but the luck of its distribution across multi-member constituencies saw it lose five seats, falling to 53 of the total 109.

The centre-left Socialists also lost ground, although rather less than they had in Extremadura and Aragon, finishing with 22.7% (down 1.4%) and 28 seats (down two). Vox was up 0.3% and gained a seat, taking it to 13.8% and 15 seats, while two far-left tickets shared the remaining 13 seats from 15.9% of the vote between them. (Official results are here; El Pais will give you the other regions as well.)

So the Andalusian People’s Party is back in the same place as its counterparts elsewhere – but more embarrassingly for it, since premier Juanma Moreno is a leading light of the party’s moderate wing. Co-operation with Vox would be a bitter pill for him to swallow. But unless the party is prepared to reach out to the left to join in a cordon sanitaire against the far right, he doesn’t have much else in the way of options.

Nationally, with an election due in the middle of next year, the People’s Party maintains a clear lead in the polls over the governing Socialists, but its chance of winning a majority without Vox is slim at best. Unless something dramatic happens, it looks as if the rancorous coalition politics of the regions will be played out on a national scale.