Spain voted on Sunday in an early general election in which the conservative Popular Party (PP) was tipped to beat Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialists, but likely to need the far-right to govern.
PP leader Alberto Nunez Feijoo, a former civil servant, said he hoped “Spain can start a new era” after he cast his ballot in Madrid.
Final opinion polls allowed under Spanish law and published on Monday suggested the PP was on track to win the most seats in the 350-seat parliament, but fall short of a working parliamentary majority.
That could force the PP to form a coalition with Vox, giving a far-right party a share of power at the national level for the first time since the end of the decades-long dictatorship of General Francisco Franco in 1975.
Vox is part of a Europe-wide trend of far-right parties gaining support at the ballot box, with such formations already governing alone or in coalition with the centre-right in Hungary, Italy and Finland.
‘Dark time warp’
Mr. Sanchez, in office since 2018, warned during an ill-tempered TV debate with Mr. Feijoo that a PP-Vox coalition government would “take us into a dark time warp that will leave us who knows where”.
In its electoral programme, Vox pledges to overturn laws on gender violence, LGBTQ rights, abortion and euthanasia as well as outlaw separatist parties and defend traditions such as bullfighting.
Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called Vox’s agenda “chilling” in an opinion article published in French daily Le Monde, warning its entry into government in Spain “would push Europe one step further into a right-wing abyss”.
This is the first national election in Spain’s modern history to be held at the height of summer.
Turnout as of 2 p.m. stood at 40.5%, up from 37.9% at the same tine during the last general election in 2019. The figure does not include the record 2.47 million registered voters who cast an absentee ballot. Many voters told Spanish media they voted early to avoid the scorching heat, while electric fans were installed in polling stations to try to keep people cool.
