According to the polls, these Spanish elections could be won by the conservative People’s Party, which could join forces with Vox, a far-right party with growing success.
This July 23, the Spaniards are invited to go to the polling stations. Again. After his party’s debacle in regional and municipal elections at the end of May, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez immediately set a new date for early legislative elections.
A very quick decision which surprised everyone, but which is understandable given the heavy defeat of the left. Usually, Sanchez’s party, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and Podemos, a radical left party and coalition partner of the PSOE, emerge victorious in these elections. But not this time. It was the most right-wing parties that were favored by voters, mainly the People’s Party (PP) as well as Vox, an extreme right-wing party launched less than 10 years ago. The current head of government certainly hopes that the May results have created an electric shock, which will lead left-wing voters to the polls.
For these legislative elections, a duel therefore opposes two blocs, that of conservatism with the PP and Vox, on the one hand against that of the left with the PSOE, which should ally this time with Sumar, the environmentalist and feminist movement of Yolanda Diaz, former Minister of Labor, which brings together around fifteen smaller left-wing parties. Above all, it is a less divisive formation than Podemos, whose sometimes tense relations within the coalition have played on the government’s popularity.
According to El Païs , it is the PP which would arrive at the top of the voting intentions (32.9%), followed by the PSOE (28.7%). They will therefore need to form a coalition to obtain a majority. The scores of the other parties will then be essential. And according to the latest polls, Sumar (13.7%) and Vox (13.5%) are neck and neck.
Alberto Nuñez Feijoo, the president of the People’s Party, said he would not rule out an alliance with Vox if necessary, as is already the case at other levels of power.
Nationalist, climatosceptic, Islamophobic
The chances of seeing the conservatives regain power on the left are great, as are those of seeing Vox enter the government as a partner of the PP.
Since the May elections, Vox has already been present in all the regional assemblies of the country and it was already present in Congress with more than 50 seats since 2019. Created only 10 years ago by former PP members who did not appreciate their party’s relations with the Catalan separatists, Vox is above all a nationalist party, which saw its success grow when Catalonia wanted to gain its independence. Vox was then able to win over some supporters of a united Spain.
The party program is ultra-conservative and its model is the traditional Catholic family. “ Vox is a climate sceptic, Islamophobic party, which does not recognize the existence of violence against women ”, explained political scientist Maria Elisa Alonso, teacher at the University of Lorraine, to Franceinfo . Unsurprisingly, one of their campaign axes is crime, attributed to migrants, whom elected officials want to send back to their country of origin. For the researcher, Vox is in line with other far-right European parties that govern, such as Viktor Orban’s Hungary or Giorgia Meloni’s Italy.
The party also seduces former supporters of Francoism. ” After Franco’s death, his supporters were still present, but they no longer had the means to express themselves,” continues Maria Elisa Alonso. ” They expected a political force that responds to the ideology of Francoism, and that’s Vox .” The party does not openly display itself as Francoist, but maintains a certain ambiguity on the subject.
Always further to the right
If the PP joins forces with Vox, a very probable scenario, Spain would therefore become the 6th European country led, totally or in part, by a far-right party.
Of course, there is Hungary, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban since 2010, and its infamous homophobic and anti-immigration measures. Also this Saturday, during the summer school in Baile Tusnad, in Romanian Transylvania, the Hungarian leader declared that “the EU rejects Christian heritage and organizes population exchanges through migration”, also addressing topics such as “the EU’s LGBT + offensive against European family-friendly nations” and conspiracy theories such as those of the great replacement.
It is less talked about than Hungary, but Poland is also led by the ultra-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, allied to the far-right Solidarity Poland (SP) party since 2019. Led by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who is in his second term, this government has already stood out for its measures against freedom of the press as well as bills against adoption by homosexual couples or tougher laws on blasphemy. Poland is also one of Hungary’s rare allies in the EU on the subject of migration.
And recently, Italy joined this small closed club by electing Fratelli of Italy, a party regularly described as post-fascist, and Giorgia Meloni, at the head of the country. Recently, the Prime Minister invited all the Mediterranean countries for a conference in Rome with the idea of negotiating agreements to stop the arrival of migrants.
In addition to these three countries, the far right is also a member of government coalitions elsewhere, even if one of its elected officials does not lead.
This is the case in Latvia where the National Alliance party, very anti-immigration, has been part of the majority since 2019. More recently, Finland is in the same situation. The Party of Finns, a formation which defends an identity model of society, came second in the general elections in April and has been part of the coalition led by the National Coalition Party (center right), since June, with several ministerial posts for its elected officials.
Finally, in Sweden , the Sweden Democrats (SD) party, created by nationalists and even some neo-Nazis, is not part of the government, but supports it, and regularly votes on their bills.
Not to mention the rise of the extreme right, in many other countries, not necessarily far from Belgium. In France, all the polls on the presidential elections of 2027 announce the National Rally in the second round, and in the majority of cases, Marine Le Pen in the lead. In the Netherlands, the government has just fallen because of disagreements over immigration, a golden situation for the populist and conservative parties, including the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), winner of the last provincial elections.
And in our country, all the polls of 2023 about the next elections still indicate that the Vlaams Belang will be the first party in Flanders.
