MADRID — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is poised to remain prime minister as a result of Sunday’s inconclusive national elections in which the center-right Popular Party won the most votes but was left with no clear path to form a government.
As expected, none of Spain’s major parties secured a governing majority. With 99 percent of the votes tallied, the Popular Party had 136 seats, the Socialists 122, the far-right Vox 33, and the left-wing Sumar 31.
Prior to the vote, conservative leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo indicated that he would be willing to form a coalition government with Vox, but both parties fell short of the 176 seats needed to control the Spanish parliament.
There is no scenario in which Spanish MPs would back a minority government composed of the Popular Party and Vox, and Feijóo does not appear to have enough support among the country’s smaller, regional parties to cobble together the support he would need for minority rule on his own.
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The outcome opens the door to Sánchez remaining in power.
Together with Yolanda Díaz’s left-wing Sumar coalition, the prime minister’s Socialist Party could form a coalition that controls 153 seats in parliament, but in order to govern he’ll need to forge deals with a variety of political groups with wildly different objectives.
Sánchez is unlikely to be able to obtain the backing of the 176 MPs needed to be confirmed as prime minister the first time the new parliament discusses the matter, but he could make a bid during the second round of voting, in which the candidate to head the new government has to receive more yays than nays.
In 2019, Sánchez became prime minister following that same roadmap after making deals with regional parties. But in these high-stakes elections, voters opted to back larger parties, leading smaller groups like Teruel Existe to lose their seats.
That means the Socialists will have to look for support from Basque and Catalan nationalists — among them those belonging to former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont‘s Junts party.
Puigdemont fled Spain in the immediate aftermath of the 2017 Catalan independence referendum and was subsequently elected to the European Parliament; a top EU court recently stripped his legal immunity, paving the way for his extradition to Spain.
Junts candidate Míriam Nogueras told the press that her party had “understood the result” and would “take advantage of the opportunity.”
“This is a possibility for change, to recover unity,” she said. “But we will not make Pedro Sánchez president in exchange for nothing.”
Over 37 million Spaniards were registered to vote in these elections, which were framed as a referendum on Sánchez. The tight race meant the stakes were incredibly high, with Spain facing the possibility of ending up with a government with far-right ministers for the first time since the death of Francisco Franco.
That could have signaled a wider sea-change in Europe ahead of next year’s European Parliament elections and given fuel to right-wing forces that want the EU to take more hardline stances on everything from climate policy to migration.
With 33 seats, the far-right Vox party remains the third-largest political group in the Spanish parliament, but these elections have seen it shrink from the 52 seats it secured in 2019, indicating the group may be losing steam.
At the Socialist Party headquarters in Madrid on Sunday night, euphoric supporters cheered Sánchez while shouting “¡No pasarán!,” the anti-fascist slogan used by Spain’s legitimate government in its struggle against Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War.
Despite being held in the middle of the summer and in the midst of a heatwave, some 24 million Spaniards voted in person, while a record 2.4 million opted for mail-in voting.