A ferocious democratic drama is playing out in Spain, which may keep the social democratic prime minister Pedro Sánchez in power and help stem the populist tide across Europe.
In Sunday’s general election, Sánchez appears to have held off a seemingly inevitable victory for the right-wing People’s Party (PP) in alliance with the far-right populist party Vox. Coming from 10 points behind in the polls as the beleaguered incumbent demonised by an impassioned right-wing media, Sánchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) ended up just one point behind the PP after relentlessly campaigning against the dangers of a PP-Vox populist coalition. Small left-wing and nationalist parties won enough parliamentary seats to block Alberto Feijóo, the PP leader, from taking power with Vox’s burly leader Santiago Abascal. The question now is whether the left/nationalist parties will enable Sánchez to continue in office, or whether there has to be another election.
The momentum is with Sánchez. His success in galvanising Spain’s centre and left against Vox and the PP—which under Feijóo has moved to the populist right to counter Vox (even while proposing a governing pact with the party)—may enable him to muster enough parliamentary support to fashion another term in power. But even if there is a second election this year, as happened in 2019 after a protracted stalemate, Feijóo’s poor performance in the last campaign could set the PP off on the wrong foot.
To pull off a further term without another election, Sánchez would need to strike an abstention deal with Together for Catalonia, a separatist party founded by former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont, who is currently either in exile or a fugitive from justice (depending on your perspective) since leading the failed Catalan declaration of independence in 2017. Such a pact would require more concessions of the type that have made Sánchez’s alliances with Basque and Catalan separatist parties bitterly unpopular on the Spanish right.
Sánchez has done a skilful job, in perilous circumstances, of healing the wounds of the 2017 Catalan separatist crisis while preserving Spanish unity. Key to his performance in Sunday’s election was a Catalan surge. His PSOE social democrats, with left coalition allies, won 26 of Catalonia’s 48 parliamentary seats. The PP and Vox won just 8. The next stage of Catalan pacification will test Sánchez to the limit, and could determine if he is to stay in power without igniting an overwhelming backlash from the right in wider Spain.
Sánchez is bridging divides and bitter animosities dating back to the Spanish Civil War, testing democracy itself. One of his most controversial moves in his last term was to exhume General Franco’s remains from a state mausoleum and rebury them in a municipal cemetery. He has also pioneered a progressive “fair shares” economic recovery from the Covid pandemic.
And Sanchez’s fate resonates across Europe well beyond Spain.
On the very day of the Spanish election Friedrich Merz, leader of the right-wing opposition Christian Democrats (CDU) party in Germany, made a naked coalition signal to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), echoing Feijóo’s manoeuvre in Spain. Merz took over the CDU from the right after Angela Merkel’s centrist coalition was replaced by Olaf Scholz’s SPD-led coalition with liberals and greens two years ago. A backlash from CDU moderates has led Merz to backtrack since Sunday, but a Feijóo government with Vox in Spain, following Giorgia Meloni’s populist right-wing victory in Italy last year, would encourage him further. The fate of France after Emmanuel Macron also hangs in the balance, with Marine Le Pen in the wings. A critical Polish election is also imminent.
Then there are Britain’s Tories, infected with the populist virus so badly that we got Brexit and now one divisive populist Tory campaign after another, as a diversionary right-wing strategy from tackling the UK’s economic crisis and deepening social divisions.
Social democrats are on trial across Europe as purveyors of economic progress and social unity, in the face of populists whose political strategy is to weaponise divisions and disharmony. Spain is the EU’s fourth-largest state and in many ways its most divided, so it is critical that Sánchez succeeds. The Spanish drama is a battle for Europe itself.
