By obtaining enough seats in Congress, the right and the extreme right Vox could form an alliance to obtain an absolute majority. After counting 97% of the votes, however, they had not obtained the threshold of 176 seats.
Given largely winning for months by all the polls, the Spanish right is only narrowly ahead of the Socialists of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, Sunday July 27. The latter, against all odds, still has a chance of staying in power thanks to the game of alliances, according to partial results.
After counting 97% of the votes, the People’s Party (PP) led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo won 136 seats, out of a total of 350 in the Congress of Deputies, and the far-right party Vox, its only potential ally, 33 seats. The PP therefore won 47 more seats than in the previous elections, in 2019, but was far from the 150 seats hoped for. Above all, the PP and Vox would total only 165 seats, far from the absolute majority necessary to govern, which is 176.
The Socialist Party of Pedro Sanchez was credited with 122 deputies and Sumar, his radical left ally, with 31. The Prime Minister, in power for five years, is nevertheless in a better position than his rival. He can indeed stay in power if he obtains the support of the Basque and Catalan parties, for whom Vox is a scarecrow. If no viable majority emerges, new elections could take place, in a country that has had four general elections between 2015 and 2019.
The PP was given big favorite
Accustomed to poker moves, Mr. Sanchez tried a new one by calling this early ballot the day after the rout of the left in the local elections at the end of May, to try to regain the initiative. The polls carried out over the past few days, the results of which were published at the close of the polls, all predicted a large victory for the PP and even the possibility of an absolute majority with the support of Vox.
>> Early legislative in Spain: Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s last gamble to stay in power
A government coalition between the PP and Vox would have marked the return to power of the far right in Spain for the first time since the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975, almost half a century ago. Pedro Sanchez could have benefited from a strong mobilization of the left, the participation having reached almost 70%, or 3.5 points more than during the last election, in November of 2019. Nearly 2.5 million Spaniards notably voted by post, a record figure due to the fact that this election was the first organized in the middle of summer.