On July 23rd, the Spanish general election took place. As we will discuss in greater detail in our upcoming review, the election result was inconclusive. The Partido Popular (PP) led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo won the most votes (33%) and seats (137), but the Partido Socialista Obrador de España (PSOE) led by Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez performed better than expected, with 32% of the vote and 121 seats, two more seats than his party had won in the previous election. Vox, the right-wing party with controversial positions on immigration and civil rights, did not gain votes as initially it had been expected to, but instead lost votes and seats. Its seat count declined to 33, 19 less than it won in the last election. Sumar, however, the coalition of left-wing movements led by Yolanda Diaz, which inherited the position of the populist party Podemos, staged an excellent performance, receiving more than 3 million votes and 31 seats. Regional parties meanwhile more or less held steady their share of votes and seats; they may once again prove decisive in the formation of a coalition government.
The distribution of seats In parliament could make it difficult for any major party to form a working majority. A coalition between PP and Vox could only count on 170 seats, 6 less than the 176 majority required to install a prime minister. Theoretically speaking, a new edition of the coalition led by Sanchez, between PSOE, Sumar and regional parties could lead to a new mandate for the incumbent prime minister, if the Catalan party of Junts por Catalunya (JxCat) were to abstain in the parliamentary vote to elect the Prime Minster – or to vote for Sanchez’s coalition. The problem is that on July 24th the Spanish state prosecutor’s office — Fiscalía — asked Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena to issue a new European arrest warrant for the JxCat’s leader, Carles Puigdemont, who has lived in exile in Brussels during the past few years after having held an illegal referendum for Catalonia’s independence in 2017. This is not going to make the solution of this intricate political situation any easier. One cannot rule out that new elections will be called soon, especially if Sanchez remains prime minister.
However, there is a more relevant political consideration that is worth taking account of in our view. We have discussed in previous columns and in a dedicated report how there is an ongoing attempt within the EU to build a coalition between the European People’s Party (EPP) and centre-right parties, such as the European Conservative and Reformists and even Democracy and Identity, as an alternative to the usual grand coalition between the EPP and the Socialists and Democrats (S&D). The Spanish vote shows how difficult it will be to build such an alternative scenario. The PP belongs to the EPP and Vox to ECR. In a country that is moving its political axis to the right, voters rejected the possibility of a national alliance of the two parties to form a government, by punishing the more extremist of the two (Vox).
The leader of the ECR in Europe is Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Italy’s exemplifies well the divisions of the right-wing side of the political spectrum. In fact, she governs in Italy with Forza Italia (which belongs to the EPP) and Lega (which is part of Democracy and Identity, together with Marine Le Pen’s Rassémblement National – RN – and Germany’s Alternative fur Deutschland – AfD). Lega’s leader Salvini has already said that the only way for a right-wing coalition to emerge in Europe would be to include Democracy and Identity, but the idea of coalescing with the extremists of the RN in France and AfD in Germany is highly unpalatable for the majority of EPP party leaders, who remember how autocratic governments emerged in Europe in the 1930s when centrist parties coalesced with the Nazis in Germany and the Fascists in Italy. The next few months will tell us whether this attempt at forming a right-wing coalition to elect the next EU Commission President after the European election of 2024 may still survive, or is already dead
