(Seville) The Socialists of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez suffered a new electoral setback on Sunday in their former stronghold of Andalusia (south), a key regional election which places the right in a position of strength a year and a half before the next national elections. .
Posted at 6:07 p.m.
According to almost final results, the Popular Party (PP, right) – whose candidate Juan Manuel Moreno has presided over the region since 2018 – more than doubled its score from four years ago and obtained an absolute majority in the Andalusian parliament with 58 seats out of 109.
The Socialist Party (PSOE) won 30 seats against 33 in 2018, the worst result in its history in the region, while the radical left, with which it governs in Madrid, collapsed (7 seats against 17).
This “historic” victory for the PP in Andalusia will allow it not to have to depend on the far right and put its new leader, the moderate Alberto Núñez Feijóo, in a position of strength for the next national elections scheduled for the end of 2023.
“This triumph is that of moderation and another way of doing politics and it is a very good thing for all of Spain”, launched the number two of the conservative party, Cuca Gamarra.
By winning in Andalusia, the PP inflicts a third consecutive setback on the Spanish left in a regional election, after that of Madrid in May 2021 and that of Castile and Leon in February.
“Hard blow” for Sanchez
The most populous region in the country, with 8.5 million inhabitants, Andalusia is a former historic stronghold of the socialists who ruled it continuously from 1982 to the last regional elections in 2018.
Splashed by a corruption scandal, they were then driven from power by a coalition formed by the PP and the centrists of Ciudadanos, and supported in the regional parliament by the far-right formation Vox.
This new setback in Andalusia is a “hard blow” for the PSOE after which Pedro “Sanchez could face a difficult battle to be re-elected” at the end of 2023, underlined, before the election, Antonio Barroso, analyst at the consulting firm Teneo.
Faced with a PP “in good momentum”, the head of government, who came to power in June 2018, could indeed “find it difficult to sell the results of his government in the face of voters’ concerns about inflation”, added- he.
Low Vox progression
By putting Pedro Sanchez in difficulty, containing the progress of Vox and eliminating Ciudadanos, which won no seats, the PP won on all counts in Andalusia.
Obtaining an absolute majority will indeed save him from having to govern in coalition with Vox, as he had to do recently in the region of Castile and Leon.
The far right then entered a regional government for the first time since the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975.
Third political force at national level, Vox, which had burst onto the Spanish political scene during the Andalusian regional elections of 2018, was betting a lot on Sunday’s ballot, but only recorded a slight increase with 14 regional deputies against 12 it four years ago.
A new alliance with Vox would have weakened Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who arrived at the head of the PP in early April defending a moderate line.
“Andalusia is showing us a way”, that of “moderation, dialogue, social progress”, he had declared recently, while Juan Manuel Moreno had called for a “useful vote” for “a strong government”, which is not “conditioned” by Vox.
“There is a very visible strategy” of the PP to present itself “as a reasonable alternative” to the Socialists in view of the next national elections, “a center-right option”, according to Oscar García Luengo, professor of political science at the university from Granada.