In Spain, the awakening will be difficult this Monday for the executive. Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialists suffered a new electoral setback on Sunday in their former stronghold of Andalusia.
According to almost final results, the Popular Party (PP, right) – whose candidate Juan Manuel Moreno has presided over the region since 2018 – more than doubled its score from four years ago and obtained an absolute majority in the Andalusian parliament with 58 seats out of 109. The Socialist Party (PSOE) won 30 seats against 33 in 2018, the worst result in its history in the region, while the radical left, with which it governs in Madrid, collapsed (7 seats against 17).
Feijóo in a strong position
Above all, this “historic” victory for the PP in Andalusia will allow it not to have to depend on the far right and places its new leader, the moderate Alberto Núñez Feijóo, in a position of strength in view of the next national elections scheduled for the end of 2023. .
By winning in Andalusia, the PP inflicted a third consecutive setback to the left in a regional election, after that of Madrid in May 2021 and that of Castile and Leon in February. The most populous region of the country, with 8.5 million inhabitants, Andalusia is a former historic bastion of the socialists who governed it without interruption from 1982 to the last regional of 2018. Splattered by a corruption scandal, they had were then ousted from power by a coalition formed by the PP and the centrists of Ciudadanos, and supported in the regional parliament by the far-right formation Vox.
A bad signal for Sanchez
It is therefore a “hard blow” for the PSOE after which Pedro “Sanchez could face a difficult battle to be re-elected” at the end of 2023, underlined, before the election, Antonio Barroso, analyst at the consulting firm Teneo. The head of government, who came to power in June 2018, could indeed “find it difficult to sell the results of his government in the face of voters’ concerns about inflation”.
By putting Pedro Sanchez in difficulty, containing the progress of Vox and eliminating Ciudadanos, which won no seats, the PP won on all counts in Andalusia. Obtaining an absolute majority will indeed save him from having to govern in coalition with Vox, as he had to do recently in the region of Castile and Leon. The far right then entered a regional government for the first time since the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975.
Low Vox progression
Third political force at the national level, Vox, which had burst onto the Spanish political scene during the Andalusian regional elections of 2018, was betting a lot on Sunday’s ballot but only recorded a slight increase with 14 regional deputies against 12 there. is four years old. A new alliance with Vox would also have weakened Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who arrived at the head of the PP in early April defending a moderate line.