🔴 Now: No Party Wins Enough Votes to Govern
Pedro Sánchez has a tough job ahead if he wants to form a new coalition government.
By @IanMount and @AdrianBono | July 24, 2023 | Madrid
Definitely not the night we expected!
Most pundits predicted a coalition government between center-right PP and far-right Vox. And the big winner of the elections was… no one.
That’s right. Neither the national left nor the right managed to get the 176 seats needed for an absolute majority in Parliament.
The PP, led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, was leading the recount on Sunday night with 136 seats in Parliament but even with a potential coalition with Vox, which obtained 33 seats, he fell short of hitting a majority.
What’s the TL;DR version?
The non-regional right gained seats overall. The PP and Vox totaled 169 seats, more than the 151 those two and the now-dead Ciudadanos won in 2019. But they didn’t get the big leap to a majority some polls predicted. Perhaps, in part, the underperformed because they were fighting one another, as Feijóo tried to prove he didn’t agree with and wouldn’t be beholden to Vox. Which is a tough look for a couple right before the wedding day.
The left mostly held its ground. The PSOE and Sumar won 153 seats, just two less than the 158 the PSOE had with Podemos in 2019. Not the catastrophic flop expected. They likely managed to instill fear in many voters about what Vox would do, and Sánchez didn’t attack Sumar, keeping things all smiley between them.
“Bipartidismo” (the two-party system) is back. The two big parties—the PSOE and PP—did well while their junior partners ate dirt. Sumar lost seven of Podemos’s 38 seats, and Vox lost 19 of its own 52 from 2019.
Small regional parties got squeezed. The big four national parties got 322 out of the 350 seats in parliament, leaving only 28 for the little guys. Last time the small fry had 46. Part of this drop may have been caused by an abstention push by separatist groups in Catalonia who wanted to punish the regional parties for not pushing harder for secession. This most likely helped the PSOE.
And what does it mean? Honestly, and we hate to say this, it means there is a real chance we will go to repeat elections (please, God, no, that could kill both of us). There will be negotiations in the short-term. But with these numbers it looks like they will be tough.
If the PP goes with Vox, there’s no other party to join—so they are already out.
If the PSOE tries to get every other party to support it, there is likely to be problems inside the PSOE. Many chalked up the socialists’ problems in the local/regional elections (and in this one) to Sánchez’s deals with Catalan and (especially) Basque separatist parties. If he tries to get that band together again, expect sparks as other PSOE heavyweights push for a re-think of the party’s plans—and perhaps Sánchez’s job. In any coalition or inauguration deal, the pro-independence parties are likely to push for a referendum of sorts on secession and that would cause all sorts of fighty stuff in the PSOE.
In the end… no government for now!
Enjoy your beach time!
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