In the lead-up to Sunday’s election in Spain, Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, delivered a buoyant video message to supporters of the radical right Vox party. “The hour of the patriots has arrived,” said Ms Meloni, ahead of a poll expected to deliver more evidence that authoritarian, xenophobic nationalism was becoming normalised in Europe’s politics.
It didn’t happen. Instead, after a high turnout in searing summer heat, Vox lost 19 seats, as its share of the vote fell compared with its breakthrough election in 2019. The conservative People’s party (PP), led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, won the most seats but failed to come close to winning a majority. The consequent parliamentary arithmetic means that a role for Vox as junior coalition partner, in an administration led by the PP, is a non-starter. The prospect of a radical right presence in national government, for the first time since the return of democracy to Spain in 1975, has thus receded.
For progressives both inside and outside Spain, that is something to celebrate after a deeply unsettling period. A series of European elections has seen the radical right’s agenda on issues such as irregular immigration, LGBTQ+ rights and net zero become embedded in the political mainstream. Centre-right parties, with their eyes on the prize of power, have enabled this through pacts and coalitions.
At a local level, this has already happened in Spain, with PP-Vox coalitions formed in regions such as Castilla y León. By calling a snap election after disastrous regional election results in May, the Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, gambled that in a country where Franco’s dictatorship is still within living memory, enough minds could be concentrated to see off the rising Vox threat on the national stage. He can claim to have been vindicated in that judgment.
What comes next, however, is deeply uncertain. The election result may effectively scupper, for now, the possibility of a lurch to the nationalist right. But the numbers mean Mr Sánchez’s Socialists – who came second to the PP – and their leftwing allies, Sumar, will need the assistance of a host of smaller parties to sustain their own majority.
That means tricky negotiations with Catalonia’s hardline pro-independence party, Junts, which will hope to use potential kingmaker status to revive a cause that had lost its edge – partly thanks to skilful manoeuvring by Mr Sánchez. The support of the pro-independence Basque party EH Bildu – whose historic links with the former terrorist group Eta cast a shadow over the last Socialist-led administration – would also be required. In such a fragmented and polarised political landscape, and after such an inconclusive result, there is a real possibility of stalemate and a new election – the sixth in eight years.
The complexity of the Spanish context, and the distinctive issues around nationhood and nationalism that have emerged in the post-Franco era, mean that lessons for the rest of Europe should not be glibly drawn from Sunday’s result. Nevertheless, having witnessed regional PP-Vox coalitions in action in recent months, and observed the illiberal consequences, on Sunday Spanish voters rejected the idea of installing something similar on a national scale. In a week when Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s Christian Democrats, has endorsed the idea of local alliances with the far‑right Alternative für Deutschland party, that has to count as very welcome news indeed.
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