Spain heads to early elections in a battle in which the conservative and progressive blocs will fight to gain support to form the next government

The elections arrive this Sunday, July 23, in advance for the Spaniards, who awaited them in December, but the Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez brought them forward after the poor results obtained by the socialists in the municipal and regional elections on May 28.

The campaign for the Spanish general election ended this Friday after two weeks marked by postal voting and televised debates, some intense days that left two very well-defined political blocs, the left and the right, whose candidates in this last stretch seek the useful voice that avoids having to make agreements to govern.

Tomorrow will be a day of reflection, which in Spain means that all campaigning is prohibited ahead of elections on Sunday.

The candidates

PSOE and PP, the main rivals

The president of the Spanish government, the socialist Pedro Sánchez, who has been in power for five years, hopes this Sunday to deny the polls predicting a victory for the right in parliamentary elections.

“We’re going to win the elections and we’re going to win them resoundingly!” Sánchez exclaimed Friday at the closing ceremony of the campaign in Getafe, near Madrid, as he was cheered by his supporters as “President, President, President!”

Despite Sánchez’s confidence in the “comeback”, for which he has good results from the far-left Sumar coalition led by Yolanda Días, the polls continue to show Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s PP as the favorite of this expected parliamentary election.

However, polls show that the PP will not win the absolute majority needed to form an executive, and so could be forced to join the ultra-nationalist Vox party, led by Santiago Abascal, in a country where the far right has not been in government since the end of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in 1975.

The possibility of a blockade is not ruled out, should there not be a viable majority on the right or left, leading the country to new elections, a scenario of instability it had already experienced in 2015 and 2019, when elections had to be repeated.

In his last campaign campaign, in A Coruña, in his native region of Galicia (northwest), Feijóo attacked the left and asked for great support to rule alone: ​​“they don’t know how to arrive, they don’t know how to be and they don’t know how to leave. I promise that I will know how to arrive, and I assure you that I want to arrive alone”.

Sánchez has burned his last cartridges and has set the tone against Núñez Feijóo for his relationship with a known drug trafficker, Marcial Dorado.

Sánchez mocked his rival’s argument, claiming that Google didn’t exist at the time he met Dorado, so it was hard to know what he was doing.

“I did not expect, nothing more, nothing less, that the president of the government would use this rubbish to try to discredit the opponent,” the conservative leader responded Friday to COPE radio, whose press published photos from the mid-1990s together with Dorado, one of them on a yacht belonging to the Galician smuggler.

The PP, which was removed from power in 2018 by a vote of no confidence in Congress led by Sánchez, believes it is time to rule again.

Núñez Feijóo, whose campaign slogan is “repeal sanchismo”, is seeking to reverse many of the laws promoted by the socialists’ coalition government with the far-left.

The Conservative leader refused to take part in a televised debate with the other candidates on Wednesday, drawing criticism. He also had to deal with pensions, a very sensitive subject in the public opinion.

vote absent

Voting by mail will be essential in this election, as more than 2.46 million Spaniards have chosen this voting option, awaiting final data from the state postal service, Correos, which decided yesterday to extend the date for the delivery of the ballots by one more day (until 12 noon on Friday).

In this general election, which will be held for the first time in the very hot Spanish summer, some 2.5 million people will vote by mail, an unprecedented number, which is a sign to pollsters that turnout can be high, despite the heat and the fact that many voters are on holiday.