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Spain was plunged into political uncertainty on Sunday night as the right and left failed to find a clear path to form a government, although the opposition Popular Party won a majority of seats in parliament.
The deadlock leaves the EU’s fourth-largest economy in limbo and opens the door to weeks or months of messy negotiations over voting alliances, or repeat elections, as happened in 2015-16 and 2019.
Defying the odds, Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez put up enough resistance to prevent Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s PP from securing a conservative parliamentary majority in alliance with the far-right party Vox.
Although Sánchez’s party did better than polls had predicted, winning two more seats than in 2019, it fell short of the absolute majority needed to take office even with the support of its existing allies.
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However, a jubilant Sánchez told supporters outside his party’s headquarters that “the reactionary bloc of the Popular Party and Vox has been defeated.”
Feijóo said he had won but, looking stone-faced, appealed to be allowed to form a government because his was the largest party in Congress. “If the most voted party in Spain cannot govern, the only alternative is the attack, which does not benefit Spain, does not benefit our international prestige or the security of investments,” said Feijóo.
During the campaign, however, Sánchez indicated that he would not enable the PP to form a minority government.
Spanish Prime Minister and leader of the Socialist Party Pedro Sánchez © AFP via Getty Images
The new parliamentary pacts will emerge only from intense negotiation between the biggest parties and two different sets of potential allies among Spain’s fragmented cadre of small regional groups.
But none of the most likely constellations brings the PP or the Socialists to the 176 seats needed for a majority in the 350-seat congress.
The result gives a potentially key role to Junts per Catalunya, a hard-line separatist party with seven seats that could drive a hard bargain to give Sánchez its votes.
Feijóo’s position is complicated by the fact that his potential partner, Vox, fiercely opposes separatist political parties and wants to ban them, making it hard to imagine one of them joining a conservative alliance.
If neither Feijóo nor Sánchez gets a majority, the Spanish will have to vote in another general election, the sixth in eight years.
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Vox leader Santiago Abascal, whose party won 19 fewer seats than in 2019, accused the PP of demotivating voters by pretending victory was assured, and criticized Feijóo’s failure to attend a debate in the final week of the campaign.
“Some sold the bear skin before going hunting and this has a clear consequence in terms of demobilization,” said Abascal.
Vox had promised to bring to a coalition government her denial of human-driven climate change, her opposition to Muslim immigration, her challenge to the idea of gender-based violence and her desire to scrap a law cementing LGBT+ rights.
With 100 percent of the votes counted, the PP had obtained 136 seats and the Socialists 122; Vox had secured 33 and Sumar — a new left-wing group that would join a coalition with Sánchez — had 31.
Sánchez, 51, called the snap general election after his party suffered resounding defeats in municipal and regional elections in late May, betting it would perform better in July than expected at the scheduled December election date.
Vox party leader Santiago Abascal, right, with supporters outside his party headquarters in Madrid after the election © AP
Pollsters said he had won over some wavering voters in the final days of the campaign with his warnings that a possible PP-Vox coalition would drag the country from 2023 to “1973”.
Others said the PP had fallen short because Feijóo, 61, focused a negative campaign on his criticism of “sanchismo” — which he defined as a creed of “lies, manipulation and evil” — and did not offer a positive vision for Spain.
Feijóo also launched fierce attacks on Sánchez’s controversial political alliances with pro-independence parties in Catalonia and the Basque Country, which allowed the prime minister to take office in 2018 and subsequently pass major legislative reforms.
