Candidates appeal to undecided Spanish voters to choose wisely

Appealing to Spain’s large pool of undecided voters, top candidates on both the right and left are urging Spaniards to choose wisely and keep the far-right at bay in tomorrow’s general election.

What those undecided voters do in this tight race will shape the fortunes of the two political blocs that loosely took shape during campaigningthatendedyesterday. With no single party expected to win more than 50 per cent of Sunday’s vote, the question becomes which of Spain’s top five parties will join together after the vote to create a governing alliance.

The incumbent Socialist candidate, prime minister Pedro Sanchez, said yesterday that he is open to a coalition with the anti-austerity United We Can party, hinting for the first time at a possible center-left governing deal.

On the political right, which the conservative Popular Party used to dominate but which has splintered into three main groups, the upstart far-right Vox party is making inroads. Citizens leader Albert Rivera, meanwhile, insists that his center-right party will only join a governing coalition with the conservatives.

The Popular Party’s new leader, Pablo Casado, is committed to unseating Mr Sanchez but is also battling to stop the far-right from draining votes away from his party, as pollsters are predicting.

“The only alternative to Sanchez is the Popular Party, because we are the only ones that can reach agreements and avoid a deadlock,” Mr Casado told esradio on Friday, warning that Spain’s economy would suffer under a centreleft alliance.

In an interview with Cope radio, Mr Rivera urged voters to “mobilise in order to kick Sanchez out of Moncloa Palace,” the seat of the Spanish government.

All candidates were holding closing rallies in Madrid, with Mr Sanchez and Mr Rivera also moving late in the evening to Valencia, where a regional election is also being held on Sunday.

The only certainty as they readied for those final campaign rallies is that a far-right populist party is poised to sit in Spain’s national parliament for the first time since the 1980s, and that an even more fractured political landscape is likely to emerge from Sunday’s election.

Astrid Barrio, a politics professor at the University of Valencia, said the real fight is taking place between the three right-wing parties. Vox has surged in support, mainly due to a rise in Spanish nationalism that is the result of separatist demands in the northeastern Catalonia region.

“The left has not responded to the right’s radicalisation and separatist parties have not even dared to call for an independence referendum,” Mr Barrio said.