Spain’s Far Left is thrashed at the elections promising a Right-Wing Coalition Government
After the Spanish left’s crushing defeat in local elections, Pedro Sánchez called for snap elections on July 23. Spain, which has had Europe’s most radical leftist coalition government in recent years, is the latest EU country to shift to the right. Spaniards voted on Sunday, May 28 to elect their regional and municipal assemblies. The results that came out of the ballot boxes do not bode well for Pedro Sánchez’s governing coalition of socialists, far-left populists, and communists.
The landslide victory of the centre-right People’s Party (PP) and Vox’s far-right in the local and regional elections came after a campaign marred by attempts by members of the prime minister’s socialist party (PSOE) to rig the election in some municipalities.
There was also the usual hate speech directed at conservatives from government circles that has resulted in acts of physical violence by far-left extremists and the presence of former terrorists linked to the Basque Marxist organization (ETA) in the electoral lists of a regional far-left party, Bildu, which has been crucial to maintaining Sٞánchez’s minority far left regime in power.
Those election irregularities have gone unnoticed in Brussels where Europe’s left-liberal establishment is preoccupied with the rule of law solely in member states ruled by right-wing conservatives. Although the definitive results were not yet fully known on Monday, it was already clear that out of 17 autonomous regions in total and of the 12 where elections were held on Sunday, the centre-right PP has now taken over at least six of the 10 that were governed by the far left.
Valencia the only region that was governed by the PSOE’s coalition partner, Podemos, together with far-left allies fell into the hands of the centre-right too. The PP will need Vox to govern in several regions and not only, as until now, in Castile and León.
The PSOE’s far-left coalition partner Podemos lost the region of Valencia where it governed with other far-left parties, and it suffered heavy losses all over Spain, including in the capital city of Madrid, from which it originated and where it was wiped out of the municipal council. On Sunday, the far-left Podemos was completely wiped out in five of the 12 regional parliaments.
Meanwhile, Santiago Abascal’s right wing party Vox, which had made its first entry in a regional parliament will now be represented in all 12 regional parliaments in addition to the parliaments of Andalusia and Catalonia, which have elections at a different time. Vox’s explosive rise: Vox was created in 2013 by conservative members of the PP who did not agree with their party’s leftward drift and it now appears as a coalition partner for the PP in most regions where the right is in a position to govern.
Vox achieved twice as many votes as in the municipal elections of 2019. It increased its number of seats in most of the parliaments and Abascal’s party has also increased its number of local councillors throughout the country from 530 to 1,687. In Catalonia, where its members have traditionally suffered the most brutal politically motivated attacks by separatists and left-wing activists, its number of councillors throughout the region has now risen from only three to more than 120.
Since the last parliamentary elections in the fall of 2019 in which it won 52 seats out of 349, Vox has been the third force in the Congress of Deputies behind the PSOE and the PP.
Vox will make its debut in numerous new parliaments and will become a key player in the formation of right-wing governments. Spain’s left is failing: Santiago Abascal, on his part, said on Monday that he is in favour of forming coalition governments with the PP both locally and at the national level.
‘It is our duty to build a great alternative, starting from the municipalities and regions to the terrible legacy that the pact made by Sánchez (with the far left and the separatists) has left us,’ Abascal said on Monday. If it was not for Sánchez’s decision to dissolve his government on Monday, the next general elections would have taken place next December.
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Michael Walsh
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