Spain appears headed for a hung parliament after Sunday’s national election that left parties on the left and right without a clear path to forming a new government.
With 99 percent of votes counted as of 11:45 p.m. (21:45 GMT) on Sunday, the conservative opposition Popular Party (PP) had 136 seats while the ruling Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had 122 seats.
The parties with the most potential to be royalists were almost evenly matched with the far-right Vox with 33 seats and the far-left Sumar with 31.
The result for Vox, which had campaigned on a platform of repealing laws on gender-based violence, LGBTQ rights, abortion and euthanasia, marks a loss of 19 seats compared to four years earlier.
While Sánchez’s Socialists came second, they and their allied parties celebrated the result as a victory, as their combined forces won slightly more seats than the PP and the far right.
The bloc that could probably support Sánchez had a total of 172 seats, while the bloc on the right, behind PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijoo, was likely to have 170.
Al Jazeera’s Sonia Gallego, reporting from Madrid, said Spain “once again finds itself in political limbo”.
“And there is no indication of exactly which direction the country is going, either with Mr. Sanchez’s vision or whether everything will change under a government headed by Mr. Feijoo,” he said.
The closer-than-expected result for the two blocs would likely produce weeks of political gamesmanship and uncertainty over the country’s future leadership.
Negotiations to form governments will begin after the meeting of a new parliament on August 17.
Sánchez described Sunday’s result as a defeat for the far right.
“Spain and all its citizens who have voted have been absolutely clear,” he told a jubilant crowd gathered at the Socialists’ headquarters in Madrid. “The backward-looking bloc that wanted to roll back all the progress we made over the past four years has failed.”
Spain’s Socialist leader Pedro Sánchez, right, and his allies described Sunday’s result as a victory[Nacho Doce/ Reuters]
Sánchez had called the early polls at the end of May after his Socialist Party and its far-left junior coalition partners suffered a burnout in local and regional elections in which the right surged.
He has focused his campaign on warning about the danger of a PP-Vox government to mobilize the electorate. The strategy appears to have paid off, with participation at nearly 70 percent, up 3.5 percentage points from 2019.
“Country Divided”
Feijoo, who took over as head of the PP in April 2022, had focused his campaign on promising to “overthrow Sanchism” a derogatory term for Sánchez’s policies.
Speaking after the count, the Conservative opposition leader said he would push for the chance to form government as the party with the most votes.
“As the candidate of the party that won the most seats, I think it is my duty to try to form a government,” he told supporters in front of the PP headquarters in Madrid.
To do this, Feijoo could try to persuade the smaller parties to support a PP-Vox coalition. But many appear reluctant to support the rise to power of a far-right party for the first time since the four-decade rule of dictator Francisco Franco, who died in 1975.
The Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) said before the election that it had no agreement with PP and Vox, while Teruel Existe told El País that it would not support such a coalition.
While Sánchez has more options for negotiations, he may still struggle to muster a majority, with potential allies seeking concessions in exchange for his support.
In the current scenario, Sánchez’s PSOE would depend a lot on the Catalan separatist parties, the Junts and ERC or the Basque separatists EH Bildu. If Junts calls for a referendum on the independence of northeastern Catalonia, it would probably be too expensive a price for Sánchez.
“We will not make Pedro Sánchez prime minister in exchange for anything,” said Junts’ Miriam Nogueras after the results left her party with the keys to power.
Santiago Abascal, leader of Vox, for his part, has said that the results of the Socialists are “bad news for the Spanish”.
“Pedro Sánchez, despite losing the elections, can block [Feijoo’s] investiture and, even worse, Pedro Sánchez could be invested even with the support of communism, coup separatism and terrorism, all of which will now have more influence on blackmail than in his previous mandate,” he told supporters.
Hung parliaments have become the norm in recent years due to the fragmentation of Spanish politics and the emergence of new parties challenging the dominance of the PP and PSOE.
The country held two elections in six months at the end of 2015 and 2016, after which there was a 10-month standoff until the Socialists finally agreed to abstain from a confidence vote to allow the PP to form a minority government.
In 2019, two more elections were held before the PSOE and the far-left Podemos agreed to form Spain’s first coalition government.
Pablo Calderón Martínez, a professor at the Northeastern University, told Al Jazeera that Sunday’s result revealed a “divided country.”
“The Socialist Party has slightly outperformed, while the right-wing bloc has perhaps underperformed, which means we have a very divided country. It will be interesting to see how they negotiate the next government,” he said.
