With nearly all of the votes counted, Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) is celebrating a convincing victory in Spain’s general election – the third to be held in just four years.
PSOE took 123 seats, trailed by the anti-Catalan nationalism Citizens Party (57 seats), the conservative People’s Party (66), the left-wing Podemos (42), the far-right Vox Party (24), and the Republican Left of Catalonia (15).
A coalition of 176 seats is required to form a majority in the Congress of Deputies, and the PSOE’s increased take from the previous election in June 2016 (where it garnered 84 seats) is expected to pave the way for a relatively smooth coalition-building process.
Impact
This latest trip to the ballot box had no shortage of interesting storylines.
First and foremost, the election marked the momentous collapse of the Mariano Rajoy-era People’s Party, which had been a powerhouse of conservative politics for decades. The party’s dominance led to its eventual downfall in the Gürtel case, which brought years of institutional corruption to light and triggered a no confidence vote on former prime minister Rajoy in 2018.
Rajoy subsequently stepped down as the party leader, but it appears to have made little difference at the ballot box. The PP won 66 seats, down from its 134-seat take in the previous election. It’s the worst result by far since the party’s formation back in 1989, when it finished with 107 seats.
Some PP support found its way to the Vox Party, which entered parliament for the first time with 24 seats. Vox is the latest manifestation of the populist strain of politics sweeping the democratic world; the party has even adopted the Trumpian rallying call with its motto Hacer España Grande Otra Vez (“Make Spain Great Again”). It advances many of the same themes of its European counterparts, singling out globalist elites and non-Christian immigrants for criticism. Yet these are not the issues that are fueling the party’s rise to the fringes of electoral respectability. Rather it’s the question of Catalonia independence that has really mobilized the Vox base, and the party continues to advance a hard line against Catalan nationalism (for example, pushing to revoke the region’s political autonomy).
