Spain’s political future uncertain despite Socialist party’s victory
● Far right on the rise as government may need to make deal to retain power
political future is no clearer after a third election since 2015, with experts saying yesterday that the muddle will not be resolved “any time soon”.
The incumbent prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, celebrated after his Socialist party won the most votes in Sunday’s election. But Spanish politicians were doing the maths on how Mr Sanchez might survive the next four years without a parliamentary majority.
Spain’s political right is fractured as the traditional conservative Popular Party suffered a humiliating defeat.
On the other hand, Sunday’s election marked the rise of the far-right and a high point for an expanding centre-right party.
All in all, the result did little to dispel government uncertainty in the eurozone’s fourth largest economy.
It could take weeks or months for Spain’s political future to be clarified, according to Andrew Dowling, an expert on contemporary Spanish politics at Cardiff University.
“If the Socialist party wants to stay in power for the next four years, it needs to find mechanisms of accommodation to ensure a degree of stability,” he said.
Mr Sanchez hailed the centre-left Socialists’ victory as an antidote against a reactionary wave of national populism, pledging to help strengthen the European Union.
But the Socialist party won only 29 per cent of the vote, and it still needs to make tough political decisions in order to govern.
With only 123 seats in the 350-seat Congress of Deputies, Spain’s parliament, the Socialists will need to negotiate the support of smaller rival parties to pass legislation.
Even an alliance with the farleft, anti-austerity party United We Can – the most obvispain’s ous potential partner – would not give the Socialists the key number of 176 seats.
There are other options, however. Incumbent deputy prime minister Carmen Calvo said yesterday she believed the election result, which increased the Socialists’ parliamentary seats from 85 to 123, was “more than enough” of a public endorsement to allow her Socialist party to rule alone as a minority government.
Spain’s Socialists have notanother ed the success of the Socialist administration in neighbouring Portugal, where the minority government has an understanding with other leftof-centre parties which provide support by often voting with it in parliament.
However, the Socialist party came to power in Spain last June in a minority government and lasted less than a year after opposition parties, including Catalonia’s separatists, refused to endorse its public spending plan.
possibility is a broad centrist alliance with the Citizens party, which shot from 32 to 57 parliamentary seats in the election.
However, the centrist Citizens party says it wants to lead Spain’s political opposition, ruling out entering a governing alliance with the Socialists.
Speaking on the day after the ballot, party spokeswoman Ines Arrimadas again rejected talks to back Mr Sanchez, while presenting Citizens as the leading force in the opposition.
Another unpredictable path that Mr Sanchez could consider is to seek the support of secessionists in Catalonia.
The unflagging demands of separatists for that wealthy region’s independence brought in 2017 Spain’s worst constitutional crisis in decades, and the price of their support may be too high for Mr Sanchez.
Much of the uncertainty stems from how Spain’s political landscape has fragmented in recent years, after decades in which the Socialist party and the conservative Popular Party took turns in power.