Elections in Spain: the PSOE and Vox enter …

From Madrid

In the most important elections of recent years, the Spanish left has managed to win widely in the right bloc. The Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) won 28.7% of the vote, compared with 14.3% for Unidas Podemos (UP). The support obtained by the two forces gives them respectively 123 and 42 deputies to the Spanish Congress. A sum of 165 which leaves the left a step forward to obtain the parliamentary majority of 176 seats required to form a government. The far right, Vox, who in recent days had promised to challenge the Popular Party (PP) and the citizens (Cs), the scepter of the right, was the fifth most voted force and will enter Parliament with 57 representatives.

The main right-wing force, the PP, was the second most voted although it was a historic defeat. 16.7% of the vote, 66 MPs, less than half of those who won the 2016 elections, and one of the worst scores since its birth in 1989. The force led by Albert Rivera, Citizens, C & # 39, was the big winner among the right electorate. His party greatly improved the 2016 mark and won 57 seats. His performance shows that he managed to seize the PP while lying far from the far right Vox, who will enter Congress with 24 deputies.

The results confirmed the end of bipartisanship and opened the doors to a new political era in which parties should reach agreements and form coalitions to govern. In this way, the PSOE will start from this Monday and we will finally see your letters. The same he decided to keep scrupulously during the election campaign: if he decides to seek a pact right, betting on Cs and inciting the Spanish establishment, or trying to left with UP and support or abstention from sovereignist parties.

This decision will also depend on the reorganization of the political scenario. If Rivera decides to stay out of a government agreement, his electoral support allows him to claim the title of opposition leader, while the PP decides how to overcome the crisis.

The Catalonia region was one of the sound notes of election day. Turnout increased by almost one million citizens compared to the 2016 elections. The big winner was the left-wing sovereignist force Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, imposed for the first time in this autonomous community and admitting 15 deputies to Congress . The second most voted force is the Catalan Socialist Party, which won 12 seats and won five seats in 2016. The strength of the former president of the Generalitat, Carles Puigdemont, gained the support of six representatives, the Less than in the previous electoral register.

These elections, presented as decisive in ideological and systemic terms, provoked tectonic changes in the country. From the end of bipartisanship to the parliamentary breakthrough of the far right. Another, without a doubt, will be the conformation for the first time in the history of a coalition government. What political color we will start to know from tomorrow.