Did Pedro Sánchez Make a Fatal Bet?

Spain’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has brought forward the country’s next general election to July 23, five months earlier than originally scheduled. The unexpected decision was a reaction to heavy losses suffered by his party in regional and municipal elections across Spain on May 28: Of the 12 regions that voted, the conservative Popular Party (PP) now controls nine. But the move to call early elections, which took even some members of his own government by surprise, is risky. If Sánchez hopes that calling Spaniards to a midsummer election during a record-breaking heat wave will reinstate his leftist coalition with a parliamentary majority, his gamble is likely to backfire.

Sánchez’s move aims to prevent a central government composed of the PP and far-right party Vox from gaining power, but his reelection bid is up against the overwhelming shift to the right which took place across the country on May 28. While it applied to local government, the magnitude of this shift can be taken as indicative of the national mood—as can the willingness of local PP governments to enter coalitions with Vox. In Seville, the capital of Andalusia and traditionally a socialist stronghold, the PP bumped Sánchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) from first place with 41.2 percent of the vote, winning six more seats on the city council but falling two short of a majority. In Valencia, the PP won 35 percent of the vote and doubled its number of deputies before reaching a coalition arrangement with Vox to govern the region. The conservatives also took pole position from the socialists in the Balearic Islands and the northeastern region of Aragon. Vox now has the opportunity to play kingmaker in both.

If the PP wins the national vote, Spain’s parliamentary system would appoint a PP politician as prime minister, but the party might have to form a coalition with Vox to gain a majority in congress. Sánchez is hoping that the fear of a PP-Vox arrangement at the national level—which May 28 proved is now a real possibility—will galvanize center-left voters into supporting him. But it looks as if his efforts will be in vain.

By calling for early elections rather than ramping up his campaign on the assigned timeline, Sánchez is fighting the last war. He aims to replicate the success of the snap election he called in April 2019, almost a year after ousting Mariano Rajoy from power with a no-confidence vote. The PSOE won that gamble, gaining 38 more seats in the national parliament, and entered a coalition arrangement with the progressive party Podemos (although even together, they lacked a majority). But there are crucial dissimilarities between then and now. In 2019, the conservatives were a spent force, their reputation damaged by the Gürtel corruption scandal. As a result, the PP lost 69 seats in that vote, thus showing how well Sánchez had timed it. And Vox was just emerging onto the national scene. Today, Sánchez is dealing with a center-right opposition much larger and more energized than the one he faced just over four years ago.

The strength of today’s conservative vote is a crucial dissimilarity between today’s situation in Spain and a situation in Portugal last year, where a similar electoral gamble paid off—a gamble that Sánchez may be trying to emulate. In January 2022, Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa successfully bet on a snap election to strengthen his mandate. Costa’s Socialist Party won an absolute majority, but they weren’t facing a center-right bloc as galvanized as Spain’s PP. Nor were they facing a serious threat from the far right: At the beginning of 2022, Vox’s Portuguese counterpart, Chega, had just one seat in parliament and hardly any regional representation.

In Spain, by contrast, Vox is now a major player, despite being a relative newcomer. Its strength and rapid growth indicate that Sánchez may have a tough time defeating it. Founded in 2013 by a cabal of ex-PP members, Vox failed to secure a presence in Spain’s 350-seat Congress of Deputies in its first two general elections, securing just 0.23 percent and 0.2 percent of the national vote in 2015 and 2016, respectively. But in 2018, the party won its first regional seats in the southern region of Andalusia (Spain’s most populous), and in 2019, a year in which there were two general elections, Spaniards voted for Vox in the millions. In April of that year (the snap vote that Sánchez won), Vox took 10.24 percent of the national vote and 24 seats in Congress; in the second, held in November, Vox gained an extra 28 seats with 15 percent of the vote. The party is now Spain’s third largest, with 52 seats in the Congress of Deputies, three in the Senate, and four in the European Parliament.

Providing muscle where the PP was weak proved to be a winning formula, and one that has helped Vox in more recent votes, including on May 28. The Catalan independence crisis of 2017-2019 fueled this surge in popularity, creating space for a strongly pro-union force that a directionless PP failed to fill, At a rally in Madrid just before April 2019’s general election, Vox leader Santiago Abascal declared Sánchez’s government “illegitimate” and claimed that it was supported by “separatists, populists and friends of terrorists,” a reference to the fact that the PSOE relied on votes from the progressive Podemos as well as Catalan and Basque parties, which are frequently referred to in those terms by Spain’s right-wing pundits.

Abascal has not been afraid to alienate his more moderate base by evoking nostalgia for the country’s Francoist regime, which has proven to be another winning electoral formula. This follows a trend that is on the rise elsewhere in Europe. Giorgia Meloni led Vox’s Italian counterpart, Brothers of Italy, to first place in last fall’s general election. Her party’s legacy can be traced back to the neofascist Italian Social Movement, which was founded by followers of Benito Mussolini in 1946, a year after the dictator’s death—but that hasn’t put voters off. Spain’s right and far right could see her success as an encouragement as they hope to crown the decisive regional showing on May 28th with a national win.

Sánchez has already lost in one of the biggest and most politically powerful regions of Spain. In the Spanish capital and surrounding Community of Madrid, home to some 6.7 million people (around 14 percent of Spain’s total population), Sánchez has already been indirectly but firmly rejected. The president of the capital region, Isabel Ayuso of the PP, has been the prime minister’s most strident critic since taking office in 2019. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, she adopted an anti-lockdown stance that even other conservative leaders, both in Spain and across Europe, backed away from. This January, she challenged the central government’s wealth tax in court, arguing that it violates the constitutionally protected autonomy of Spain’s regions.

It’s won her votes. Writing in the Daily Telegraph a couple of weeks before the May elections, Ayuso defended a libertarian principle, one that has come to define her premiership: “This is freedom. Let the individual decide.” In that article, Ayuso was arguing in favor of lower corporate and income taxation, but the same underlying principle explains her refusal to impose regional lockdown measures toward the end of the pandemic, when they were no longer under the central government’s control. Yet rather than being punished for defying federal policy, Ayuso gained 47.3 percent of the Madrid vote on May 28 and upped her seats from 65 to 70, thus securing an absolute majority.

It’s not just vast urban communities such as Madrid and Valencia that have rejected the PSOE directly, and Sánchez by implication. Since May 28, the PP controls Aragon, a lush, predominantly rural region between Valencia and the French border, and after a deal struck at the beginning of this month, is now also part of a coalition with Vox in southwestern Extremadura, one of Spain’s wildest and least populated areas. Defying Sánchez wins votes, both inside Spain’s urban regions and out.

To make matters more difficult for the prime minister, the smaller leftist parties that he may have to count on for support are likely to be unprepared for a general election five months ahead of schedule. And he badly needs their backing. Since the rise of Podemos and Ciudadanos in 2015, the country has seen three general elections, none of which has given a majority to either the socialists or the conservatives.

The odds don’t look great for these parties. Labor Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Diaz launched Sumar, a new progressive platform, in March. Although driven by a refreshingly noncombative approach and headed by one of Spain’s most dynamic and popular politicians, it’s an unknown quantity on the campaign trail. Podemos has been in decline ever since its co-founder and ex-leader Pablo Iglesias quit politics in May 2021 after a drubbing by the PP in Madrid’s regional elections. Now, it has no representation in six of the twelve regions contested on May 28, and only small presences in the others. Recognizing that they’re stronger together, Sumar and Podemos have announced that they’ll run jointly on July 23, but disagreements remain between the leaderships of both parties. Unless this changes, it will be difficult for the smaller leftist parties to present a united backing for Sánchez.

At the national level, Podemos’s partnership with the socialists has been dogged by serious disagreements. The most publicized showdown took place over the “Only Yes Means Yes” sexual assault law, which was introduced by a Podemos member last fall with the apparently unforeseen consequence that prison sentences for hundreds of previously convicted sex offenders were reduced. This was owed to the fact that the new law contained a more expansive, consent-based definition of sexual assault with a lower minimum sentence, which could then be retroactively applied to offenders already serving time—some were even reported as being eligible for release. Amendments have been made to block this self-defeating loophole, but Sánchez still refers to the poorly phrased law as his government’s “biggest mistake.”

An equally damaging internal conflict was triggered last March, when Sánchez canceled  decades of Spanish neutrality over Western Sahara. The PSOE leader alienated Podemos by suddenly announcing that Moroccan autonomy represented the “most serious, realistic, and credible basis” for a resolution in the region; Podemos disassociated itself from this surprise decision, instead reaffirming its support for a U.N.-backed referendum on Sahrawi self-determination.

Sánchez seems to be hoping for a semi-miraculous act of generosity from jaded socialists and wavering centrists, even though May’s results suggest that many such voters have already abandoned the socialists for the PP, or capitulated to Vox from the PP. The results of May 28—combined with the steady rise of Vox since 2018 and the PP’s firm grip on Madrid—suggest that large swaths of the electorate don’t see a repeat at the national level as a leap into the unknown. Perhaps this time, Sánchez’s luck has run out.