Deadlock in Spanish election as ‘right-wing’ Vox stumbles
Posted by admin978 on July 24, 2023 · Leave a Comment
During the past fortnight British media coverage of the Spanish general election has verged on hysteria as journalists and politicians (including former Prime Minister Gordon Brown) recycled the tired ‘anti-fascist’ rhetoric of Spain’s Civil War era. Many on the British left are eager to revive memories of that era, since they are dimly aware that unlike today’s ‘socialists’, their fathers and grandfathers actually believed in something.
The conservative Daily Mail ran a scaremongering article that associated today’s Vox party with 1930s nationalism, and even mangled nationalist history by conflating the reactionary caudillo Francisco Franco with the radical Falange.
The reason for all this hysteria was that Vox – a party that the media likes to portray as ‘far right’ – seemed likely to be the power-broker putting the conservative Partido Popular (PP) into government.
In the September issue of H&D, our correspondent Isabel Peralta will explain the true nature of Vox and the true crisis of Spanish ‘democracy’, in the context of yesterday’s election results and the inevitable post-election horse-trading.
But in this initial report we simply look at the results.
Vox polled 12.4% (down from 15.1% at the previous election in 2019) and lost 19 of its previous 52 seats in the Congress of Deputies. The conservative PP with just over 33% of the vote (up from 20.8% at the 2019 election) won 47 extra seats and now has 136. Even if the PP struck a deal with Vox‘s 33 Congressional deputies, the combined ‘right’ would be seven short of a majority.
Spanish elections are decided on a regional party list system, similar to the one used in European parliamentary elections that led to Andrew Brons and Nick Griffin being elected as MEPs in 2009. Each of the fifty provinces elects a list of Congress seats (ranging in size from Madrid with 37, to the mountainous province of Soria with two), while the autonomous Spanish cities in North Africa – Ceuta and Melilla – have one seat each.
Whereas Vox is essentially a right-wing conservative party, there were also candidates from the tiny nationalist party FE-JONS which for electoral purposes is allied to another tiny party La Falange. They paid the price for many years of ideological confusion and poor leadership. FE-JONS contested just eleven of the 52 constituencies, and in each case their vote was below 0.1%.
Vox‘s leaders, who seem to care more about personal and factional advancement than ideological principles, will be disappointed that the election result deprives them of their longed-for role as kingmakers.
The reality is that this election was a victory for the conservative PP, but its leaders will struggle to exercise any meaningful political power. Partly because conservatism is a bankrupt ideology, but also because they would need support from both Vox and at least seven votes from regionalist parties. While in other circumstances the PP might possibly be able to buy support from the Catalan populist party Junts (who have exactly the seven seats necessary) it is inconceivable that Junts would support a government that included Vox.
The electoral arithmetic just about allows for a coalition of the left, far left, and separatists, but it’s difficult to imagine that this could last for long. Such a coalition would partly depend on Sinn Fein / IRA’s friends in the Basque party EH Bildu, whose roots are in the banned party Batasuna that acted as the political wing of the terrorist ETA.
In short: Spain is set for months of instability and possibly fresh elections in the autumn. In the September edition of H&D our correspondent Isabel Peralta will report on Madrid’s ‘democratic’ circus and the media fallacy of Vox as a ‘far right’ party.
