Spain Votes in General Elections: Right-wing Favorite to Beat Left-wing Coalition

Queues to vote at the Institut del Teatre this Sunday that more than 5.7 million Catalans are summoned this Sunday to the polls to participate in the general elections, in which a total of 48 of the 350 deputies of Congress are settled in Catalonia.

Photo: EFE – Alejandro Garcia

Spain votes this Sunday in early legislative elections, with the right-wing favorite to beat Pedro Sánchez’s left-wing coalition, but with the possibility that it will have to govern with the extreme right.

Some 37.5 million voters can deposit their ballots in the polls, open between 9 in the morning, local time, and 8 pm, to renew Parliament for four years.

Almost 2.5 million people have already voted by mail, a record number, with many Spaniards on vacation in this hot summer, a context that could affect their appearance at the polls.

Follow El Espectador on WhatsApp

“What is going to happen here today is going to be very important, not only for us, logically, but also for the world and for Europe,” said the president of the outgoing government, the socialist Pedro Sánchez, after voting in a school in Madrid.

📝 We suggest: Road accidents, another scourge faced by migrants, in addition to the Darién

“I have good vibes,” said Sánchez, who called for “a historic participation” so that the next “is a strong government so that Spain can move forward.”

“Spain can start a new era and I hope and wish that the Spaniards decide freely, as we are deciding today, despite I insist on the weather conditions,” Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the Popular Party (PP, conservatives), the favorite in the polls, also said in the Spanish capital after casting his ballot.

Santiago Abascal, head of the far-right formation Vox, predicted “a heroic result” for his party, while calling for participation so that “a change of direction can take place.”

A shift to the right in the European Union’s (EU) fourth-largest economy, after Italy’s last year, would deal a new blow to the left, which now governs only half a dozen of its 27 member countries, less than a year before elections for the bloc’s parliament.

An all the more symbolic blow, in the country that currently holds the semi-annual presidency of the EU.

📌 It may interest you: Moscow accuses Ukraine of the death of a Russian journalist after a bombing

Alliance with the extreme right

“For Spain, a coalition government of PP and VOX would be beneficial because it would focus more on improving” the country, Brayan Sánchez, a 27-year-old computer scientist of Ecuadorian origin, who voted in Barcelona, ​​told AFPTV.

Brauli Muñoz, a 53-year-old teacher, said, also in the Catalan capital, that he hoped the leftist government would continue because “it is one of the best options for training for the future of our students.”

“It would be a very important surprise if the PP is not the most voted party. Another thing is that it can form a government,” political scientist Pedro Riera Sagrera, a professor at the Carlos III University of Madrid, told AFP.

Feijóo aspires to reach the magic figure of 176 deputies, the absolute majority of the 350 in the Congress of Deputies. But no survey attributes that result to him.

Therefore, it would have to resort to an alliance and its only potential partner is Vox, an ultra-nationalist and ultra-conservative party formed in 2013 from a split from the PP.

After the municipal elections in May, PP and Vox agreed to local and regional governments in which the extreme right refused to give in on its most controversial positions, such as the questioning of the notion of gender violence, its rejection of the LGBT movement and the denial of climate change.

Vox has already warned that the price of its support would be to enter the Feijóo government, which would mean the return of the extreme right to power for the first time since the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975).

Blockage risk

In the days before the elections, Feijóo said that a coalition with Vox “is not optimal.”

Sánchez, who called these early legislative elections after the defeat of the left in the municipal elections in May, has said that such a possibility would be “a setback for Spain”, with the right and the extreme right promising to reverse a good part of the legislative achievements of recent years.

📰 We also recommend: The electoral crossroads in Venezuela

Sánchez, in power since 2018, seeks to repeat his current coalition of socialists and the radical left.

Podemos, Sánchez’s uncomfortable partner since the beginning of 2020, was absorbed and replaced this year by Sumar, a formation led by the Minister of Labor, the communist and very pragmatic Yolanda Díaz.

“An important risk”, according to Pedro Riera Sagrera, is that a viable majority does not come out of the polls, neither to the right nor to the left, which would force a new vote in a few months.

👀🌎📄 Have you already heard about the latest news in the world? We invite you to see them in El Espectador.

2023-07-23 15:38:57
#Spain #votes #Sunday #option