2023-07-21 10:31:06
Spaniards will be invited to vote for the legislative elections this Sunday. Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s People’s Party is the big favourite.
All of Europe will have their eyes on Spain on Sunday. A victory for the right in the legislative elections, in which it is favored by the polls, would further strengthen the dominance of the conservative parties in the European Union.
Summoned by Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez the day after the debacle of the left in the May 28 local elections, this early election could also bring the far right back to power in MadridAnd this, for the first time since the death of dictator Francisco Franco nearly half a century ago. This would confirm “a continuous and gradual process of normalization of the extreme right at the European level”, Steven Forti, historian and professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, told AFP.
The stakes are therefore enormous for Pedro Sánchez, who has been in power since 2018 and has led a minority coalition with the radical left party Podemos since the start of 2020, but also for the European left.
Pedro Sánchez chose to make the far-right the bogeyman of the campaign, saying that voting for the PP would mean bringing Vox into government and causing a setback for the country.
A campaign against the far right
In the days following May 28, a triumph of Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s People’s Party (PP) in Sunday’s election seemed a certainty. The only question was then whether he would have need to ally with Vox, an ultra-nationalist and Europhobic far-right party born in 2013 from a split in the PP, to achieve an absolute majority in the Assembly.
Pedro Sánchez chose to make the far-right the bogeyman of the campaign, saying that voting for the PP would mean bringing Vox into government and causing a setback for the country. Its aim is to dissuade the centrist electorate from voting for the PP, but also to mobilize the half-million left-wing voters who stayed at home on May 28.
The Spaniards’ perception of their economic situation remains very negative and the polls have been against Pedro Sánchez for several months.
Mobilize voters in the middle of summer
Prime Minister talks tirelessly about his economic record, which, on a European scale, is rather good, since growth reached 5.5% last year and Spain became in June the first major economy in the European Union (EU) where inflation fell below the 2% mark (1.9%). But the Spaniards’ perception of their economic situation remains very negative and the polls have been against Pedro Sánchez for several months.
Sunday, in addition to the large number of undecided, another factor could influence the result: the date of the poll, for the first time in the middle of summer, with several million Spaniards on vacation who will have to vote by post.
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