Conservative mistakes helped Pedro Sánchez halt Vox’s march in Spain

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Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s warning that conservatives and far-right nationalists would set Spain back was far from original in the campaign’s lexicon.

But in the weeks leading up to Sunday’s vote, the conservative opposition People’s Party and Box Radicals set an example of how to deal with a coalition in local governments. And decidedly many voters didn’t like what they saw.

As a result, the PP did not win as many parliamentary seats as expected, the Box lost a third of the seats, and the right-wing bloc failed to gain a majority to form a government.Sanchez and party ally Shumal also ran outSpain fell into a stalemate.

But the prime minister claimed that he had succeeded in stopping the march of far-right forces across Europe. “Reactionary forces who proposed a complete scrapping of all the progress we’ve made in the last four years have failed,” he told his cheering supporters.

This is very different from May, when Alberto Nunez Feijo won PP. suffered such a humiliating defeat Sanchez claimed that he had decided to bet on holding a snap general election in the local elections. PP hoped to ride the same wave and win the July poll, which coincided with the seasonal beach vacation.

However, it faced difficulties working with Vox, a political party opposed to green energy, multiculturalism and feminism. As PP fell short of the parliamentary majority in May, Need to ally with Vox Form a coalition government in several Spanish regions and 140 municipalities.

Analysts said the chaotic consequences of these coalitions, including banning LGBT+ flags, culture wars over theater and closing bike lanes, had two effects.

This was a great motivator for many left-wing voters, including those who would have become disillusioned with Sanchez’s finicky coalition and would otherwise have stayed home or supported the PP. It also dampened the enthusiasm of some center-right PP voters who were already uneasy about Vox.

As a result, Spain faces weeks of nasty bargaining with smaller parties, or re-elections, with no group holding a majority in its 350-member parliament.

Feijo is known as a modest but highly effective coach, but one of his big mistakes was not putting limits on his deal with Boxes on his way to becoming prime minister, said José Ignacio Torreblanca, head of the Council for European Relations’ Madrid office. “To make matters worse, his shaky decision resulted in the road being excavated,” he said.

The PP entered into a rapid coalition agreement with Vox in the Valencia region, where one far-right official claimed “violence against women does not exist” and Feijo was convicted of “psychological violence” against his ex-wife, forcing him to veto Bock’s appointment as regional leader.

In the Balearic Islands, the parties agreed to a 110-point program on the condition that the Box abstain from voting for appointments to allow the PP to rule alone. In Extremadura, western Spain, party leaders in the region refused to consider any deal with Vox, but reversed their positions and formed a coalition that allowed ultraconservatives to control local affairs, including hunting and bullfighting.

“It’s probably in Extremadura that Feige has lost the credibility to convince undecided Socialist voters and abstaining candidates that he has the vision and authority to distance himself from Vox,” Torreblanca added.

For Sanchez, whose upbeat message on the economy failed to resonate with voters, the PP-Vox local government’s decision to abolish the environment and equality sector helped underscore the prime minister’s warning that the right-wing national coalition “will lead us into a dark time warp.”

José Pablo Ferrandis, director of pollster Ipsos, pointed to other errors in the PP campaign, including Feijo’s refusal to attend the second televised debate in which the prime minister contested Sanchez. Vox leader Santiago Abascal.

“Feijo’s absence from the debate meant that the visible face of the expected conservative coalition was the far-right Vox,” he said. “This demobilized a significant segment of the centre-right voters, dealing a heavy blow to the National Party.”

The PP’s result of 136 seats was a significant improvement from 89 seats in 2019, but fell short of the desired number of seats.

Box’s breakthrough in the last election shattered the notion that Spain was immune to the rise of far-right forces under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. But after losing a third of parliamentary seats on Sunday, Mr Sanchez showed he could only go as far as he could for now.