Local elections were held in Spain over the weekend: voting took place in some important regions and large cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Seville. The centre-right Popular Party obtained a clear victory, even exceeding expectations. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist Party managed to keep the government in only three of the twelve regions voted in: six passed to the Popular Party, which confirmed two (the Canary Islands remain in the balance) and also obtained the absolute majority in the municipality of Madrid.
The vote, which therefore rewarded the centre-right opposition and penalized the centre-left government, is a heavy blow for Sánchez, also because the general elections will be held in December, in a few months’ time. The scenario that is being hypothesized is that the leadership of the government could pass to the Popular Party, whose leader since April 2022 has been Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
Despite Sunday’s victory, in order to obtain a majority and govern in various regions, the Spanish People’s Party will need the far-right Vox party: the negotiations between the two parties will be the big theme over the next few days. Núñez Feijóo would like to obtain external support without directly involving Vox with government roles: Santiago Abascal, leader of Vox, will instead aim to obtain important concessions.
In these elections, the Popular Party obtained about 1.8 million more votes than in the last local elections, which was held in 2019. Many of these votes came from former voters of Ciudadanos, a right-wing party (initially centrist, then moved to more conservative positions) born in 2006 but essentially disappeared for some time.
The ruling Socialist Party lost a small percentage of the vote overall, equal to 1.2 percent. But this decline, coupled with a steeper decline in parties to his left and a rise in his right, has led to defeats in nearly every key region, including some historically considered “safe”. Aragon, the Balearic Islands, Cantabria, La Rjoia, Extremadura and the community of Valencia, the most important of those in which there was a vote, passed to the Popular Party. The Socialists have only maintained a majority in Castilla-La Mancha, Asturias and Navarre, while in the Canary Islands the majority will depend on agreements with the autonomist party.
Santiago Abascal, leader of the far-right party Vox (Credit Image: © Ricardo Rubio/Contacto via ZUMA Press)
The results were also similar in the big cities: in Madrid, where the Socialist Party has struggled since 2015, the right won an absolute majority at both city and regional level. Victories also arrived in Valencia, Valladolid, Palma de Mallorca and Seville, which the Socialist Party counted on keeping (Andalusia is historically a pool of votes for the left). The exception is Barcelona: in Catalonia the Popular Party has been of little relevance for some time, but here too Sánchez’s candidate did not win: Xavier Trias of the centre-right independence party Junts was the most voted, ahead of the socialist Jaume Collboni and the outgoing mayor Ada Colau, supported by Unidas Podemos. In the Basque Country we note the affirmation of the autonomists of Bildu.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo celebrated the victory of the Popular party in Madrid: “Spain has begun a new political cycle, my time will come soon, if the Spaniards want it”. The Socialists have a few months left to reverse the trend, also focusing on a possible mobilization of left-wing voters to prevent Vox’s far-right, which entered Parliament for the first time in 2019, from entering the national government. Vox got just over 7 percent of the vote nationwide.
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