Spain PM Calls Snap Election After Local Poll Drubbing

In a surprise move, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called Monday for a snap election on July 23, a day after his Socialist party suffered a drubbing in local and regional polls

Madrid, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th May, 2023 ) :In a surprise move, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called Monday for a snap election on July 23, a day after his Socialist party suffered a drubbing in local and regional polls.

Widely seen as a dress rehearsal for a general election that had been expected at the end of the year, Sunday's polls saw the main opposition group, the Popular Party (PP), chalk up the largest number of votes.

The right-wing PP also scored significant gains at a regional level, seizing six regions that had been led by Socialists, including Valencia in the east and the Balearic Islands, which includes the holiday island of Ibiza.

In a televised address, Sanchez said he had informed King Felipe VI of his decision to dissolve parliament and call a general election on July 23 "in light of the results of yesterday's elections".

"As the head of the government and of the Socialist party, I take responsibility for the results and I think it is necessary to respond and submit our democratic mandate to the popular will," he said.

The results "require a clarification from Spaniards about what policies the government should implement and which political forces should lead this phase," he said.

- 'Bloodletting' - Oriol Bartomeus, a professor in politics at the Barcelona Autonomous University, said Sanchez was "facing a dismal defeat and now he's changed the playing field".

"The alternative was six months of governmental bloodletting and he has decided to gamble it all," he told AFP.

In office since 2018, Sanchez has faced obstacles including voter fatigue with his left-wing government as well as soaring inflation and falling purchasing power in the eurozone's fourth-largest economy.

He has also struggled to contain the fallout from repeated crises between the Socialists and their hard-left coalition partner Podemos, which also saw its support collapse in Sunday's vote.

Sanchez's reliance on the parliamentary votes of Catalan and Basque separatist parties to pass legislation has also hurt his standing.

The PP secured more than seven million votes (31.52 percent) in the municipal elections, compared with nearly 6.3 million for the Socialists (28.11 percent).

PP leader Alberto Nunez Feijoo welcomed the early election call, saying "the sooner the better".

The country "has begun a path of change that is already unstoppable," he said.

But the PP will be able to govern in several regions only with the support of the far-right Vox, also a winner in Sunday's polls -- which poses a major headache for Feijoo.

- 'Grasp the nettle' - Vox, the third-largest party in parliament, is hoping to become an indispensable partner for the PP -- both at a regional level and, ultimately, nationally.

Aware that the key to winning a general election is conquering the centre, Feijoo has sought to moderate the PP's line while keeping Vox at a distance.

Over the past year, the PP has governed with Vox in the rural region of Castilla y Leon, where it has been regularly embarrassed by its ultra-conservative positions on social issues, notably abortion.

Sanchez believes he can use the fear of the PP joining forces with Vox at the national level to mobilise voters, said Antonio Barroso, an analyst at political consultancy Teneo.

But it was not clear how the negotiations with Vox to enter regional and local governments would "affect the tendency to vote for the PP" and whether it would have "any effect in mobilising the centrist vote", he said.

Paloma Roman, a politics professor at Madrid's Complutense University, said waiting until the end of the year to go to the polls "would have been much worse" for the Socialists.

"He's decided to grasp the nettle," she told AFP.

Sanchez had criss-crossed the country in recent weeks to announce new measures including affordable housing for the young, more healthcare funding and two-euro cinema tickets for pensioners.

But while Spain's economy has performed better than most of its eurozone peers, many polls showed that voters appeared unconvinced by his economic management.