Spain: Has a far-right takeover been averted?
Well, that wasn’t the far-right blowout that was predicted, said ABC.es (Spain) in an editorial. Polls ahead of this week’s parliamentary election had indicated that the hard-right Vox party would surge to a record showing and join the center-right People’s Party in a coalition to give Spain its first extreme-right government since the Franco dictatorship ended in 1975. Instead, Vox fizzled, winning just 33 seats, 19 fewer than in the last election. While no party took an outright majority, you could still argue that the Right won, since the PP took 136 seats, ahead of the ruling Socialists’ 122. But PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo now confronts an “unpleasant dilemma.” Feijóo needs Vox’s anti-abortion, anti-immigrant lawmakers if he’s to even approach a parliamentary majority, yet if he allies with Vox, no other party will touch his coalition. The “parliamentary arithmetic is devilish.” Paradoxically, then, it’s Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the purported loser, who “emerges from this election reinforced and robust.” His current parliamentary partners say they’re willing to rejoin a coalition.
Sánchez still faces a “tricky road to victory,” though, said Aitor Hernández-Morales in Politico.eu (Belgium). Together, his Socialists and their preferred parliamentary partner, the left-wing Sumar coalition, control 153 seats in the 350-seat parliament— short of a majority. Sánchez therefore must strike deals with some fringe parties, which means the Catalonian separatist party Junts and the Basque separatist party EH Bildu are now potential kingmakers. Sánchez also needs to get Spanish King Felipe VI to tap him, rather than Feijóo, to form a government.
Traditionally, the royal nod goes to whoever secured a parliamentary majority. But with a divided parliament, the king’s responsibility is to choose “whichever leader can show they have the backing.” Sánchez has always been a smooth operator, said Carlos E. Cué in El País. The dashing Socialist exploited party infighting in 2014 to seize power “in a totally unexpected way.” Then he savvily appointed more women than men to his cabinet and went on a progressive legislative blitz that included protecting abortion and strengthening labor. Famed for his “all-or-nothing risk-taking,” Sánchez surely knows how to “take advantage of his opportunities.”
Yet such a scenario could leave Spain in the “hands of extremists,” said José Ignacio Torreblanca in El Mundo. EH Bildu, which absorbed members of the violent Basque separatist group ETA when it disbanded, ran 44 convicted terrorists in this election, some of them murderers. And Spain only recently dropped sedition charges against Junts leader Carles Puigdemont. These independence parties “do not believe in Spain as a shared and plural project,” and they are holding Sánchez “hostage.” On the bright side, Spaniards may have just saved Europe as a shared and plural project, said Bernardo de Miguel in El País. Euroskeptical autocrats from Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to Italy’s Giorgia Meloni were championing Vox “in hopes that the EU’s fourth most populous country would fall on their side”—the side of climate denial, border closures, and anti-gay fanaticism. Liberals across Europe owe Spanish voters thanks.