(CN) — In a surprise result after Sunday's elections, Socialist Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was in the pole position on Monday to form the next government — and this one could be even more radical than his current one, which includes communists.
Polls had projected that Sánchez's main opposition on the right, the Partido Popular, was on track to win enough votes to consider forming a coalition government with Vox, a far-right nationalist party rising in popularity in Spain.
But that didn't happen. Spaniards turned out in large numbers despite torrid summer heat and blocked the right-wing bloc from getting into La Moncloa, the executive building in Madrid.
Turnout was over 70% for Spain's 37 million voters, higher than the previous November 2019 election that resulted in Sánchez cobbling together the country's first-ever coalition government with Podemos, a far-left communist-inspired party that he gambled to ally with.
The Popular Party picked up 136 parliamentary seats, the most of any party. But it fell well short of the 176 it needed for a majority; even adding Vox's 33 new deputies leaves the pair coming up short, with 169 out of the 350 seats in Spain's Congress of Deputies. Meanwhile, Vox's opposition to Catalan and Basque independence drives makes any coalition with those smaller parties nearly impossible.
Sánchez and his Socialists did better than expected and won 122 seats. The conservatives won about 32.9% of the vote, but Sánchez wasn't far behind, with 31.7%. Vox and Sumar, a far-left offshoot of Podemos, tied at about 12.3% each of the national vote. It was a disappointing result especially for Vox, which saw its support dip and the loss of 19 seats in parliament.
On Sunday night, Sánchez beamed with relief.
“The reactionary bloc of regression, which set out a complete reversal of all the advances that we've achieved over the past four years, has failed,” he said in a speech to supporters, as reported by the BBC.
Now all the attention will turn to the possibility of Sánchez roping together a coalition with Sumar and four independence parties from the Basque Country and Catalonia. On Monday, he expressed the desire to avoid a re-run election and told reporters that “democracy will find a winning formula.”
Combined, a six-party coalition of leftists and separatist parties would command 178 seats, just enough for a majority. For now, such an unwieldy grouping seems unlikely to materialize any time soon. The Catalan and Basque parties could also simply agree to lend their support to shore up a new Sánchez mandate.
Opening negotiations with the motley of left-wing and right-wing regional parties will be extremely complicated and politically difficult because of their links to extremism and terrorism.
The autonomy of Spanish regions remains a deeply felt subject in Spain, which retained a monarchy and a centralized system of government after the end of the Franco dictatorship. However, certain regions, like Catalonia and the Basque Country, have gained a lot of autonomy under Spain's post-Franco constitution.
In any event, Sánchez is safe for the time being because his current term does not run out until early next year. If another election is needed, that would take place by the end of the year.
In the meantime, Sánchez will enjoy some of the international spotlight because he happens to hold the rotating presidency of the European Council for the second half of 2023. While hosting the presidency, EU states get to advance their national interests and ideas on the EU agenda.
On the campaign and in debates, Sánchez stuck to attacking the Popular Party for going into partnership with Vox at the regional level and for preparing to do so at the national level. Vox and the Popular Party are in coalition governments in Valencia and Extremadura.
Sánchez repeatedly warned Spaniards against allowing Vox into government, calling its admittance a betrayal of Spanish democracy and a misguided return to the patriarchal and macho nation of the past. Voters seemed to heed his message and he ended up doing better than the last elections in 2019.
For most of the campaign, it seemed like Sánchez had erred in calling snap elections after his left-wing partners, Podemos, splintered when Yolanda Díaz, a Podemos deputy prime minister, quit and formed her own party, Sumar, or “Unite” in English.
For months, polls registered growing momentum for his conservative challenger, the new Popular Party leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
The Popular Party was thought to be on the cusp of returning to power after a long process of cleaning up its house following a series of corruption scandals that ended with the collapse of the last Popular Party government under Mariano Rajoy in 2018.
But the taint of scandal around the Popular Party returned just days before Sunday's vote when a photograph emerged in the Spanish and international media showing Feijóo aboard the yacht of a notorious narco-trafficker he was friends with during the 1990s in his home region of Galicia, where he served as president before ascending to the top of the PP party.
Feijóo made his situation worse by skipping the final televised debate last week; that allowed Sánchez and Díaz to gang up on a visibly drained Santiago Abascal, the founder and head of Vox.
It wouldn't be the first time Sánchez has squeezed out of a political dead end.
The 51-year-old Sánchez famously won back the leadership chair of his own party, the center-left Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, after he got booted from that post for being too close to the radical left. He took the chairmanship back after he toured every region of Spain in his car and rallied support behind his progressive agenda.
He has overseen Spain's most left-wing government since the restoration of democracy following Spanish dictator Francisco Franco's death in 1975.
As Spain's first English-speaking prime minister, he's boosted the country's international image and voice. Personally, he enjoys broad support among centrist liberals in Spain, Europe and the United States.
His government has passed significant legislation for minority rights, social welfare and correcting wrongs perpetrated by the Franco regime. Sánchez also has remained largely untainted by scandal and handled his country's domestic affairs generally well.
Politics in Spain have become more heated and emotional since the provocative entry of Vox onto the scene a decade ago. The party's platform is anti-gay, anti-immigrant and nationalistic, and it likes to extol the Franco years.
Vox was at the forefront of legal and cultural fights to stop Sánchez from removing the body of Franco from a national mausoleum outside Madrid honoring victims of the Spanish Civil War.
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.
Follow @cainburdeau
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