Spain faces weeks of coalition horse-trading after Socialist win
madrid — Spain faces weeks of coalition talks after Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialists scored big but failed to gain a majority in a snap election that split the right-wing bloc and let ultra nationalists into parliament. Time, though, is on their side. With the country set to return to the polls on May 26 for regional, local and European Parliament elections, and Spain’s three rightist parties unable to form a coalition even if they wanted to, Sanchez will go slowly, and a government is unlikely before June.
“We must wait and see what will happen in the municipal elections... in many regions and of course in the European Parliament,” Socialist party president Cristina Narbona said.
“There is no hurry... we are still campaigning,” she added.
The Socialists came first in Sunday’s snap poll, winning 123 seats out of 350, or close to 29 per cent of the vote — short of an absolute majority but an improvement on the 85 seats they secured in the last election in 2016.
Their nearest rivals, the main opposition conservative Popular Party (PP), bagged just 66 seats compared to 137 in 2016, its worst showing in over two decades.
Conservative votes were split among two other parties, the centreright Ciudadanos and ultra-nationalist Vox, which won just over 10 percent of the vote in a country that has had no far-right party to speak of since the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. —