Sanchez seeks to save his skin - Spanish 2023 election
Edward Anderson begins his coverage of the Spanish general election.
For the next five weeks, Edward Anderson will be bringing you bite-sized coverage of the Spanish General Election on Bournbrook’s website, whilst offering extensive analysis in the monthly print magazine.
To begin, here are the main political parties of Spain:
PSOE - The traditional socialist party who dominated Spanish politics for twenty years after the transition. Currently in coalition with a motley crew of smaller left-wing parties, nationalists and anyone else they can cobble together.
PP - The ‘conservative’ party, who are now like their English counterparts: an overwhelming liberal organisation whose main uniting point is people who don’t want the PSOE in power.
Ciudadanos - Yet another liberal party who came out of the Spanish economic crisis and grew in opposition to nationalist parties in Pais Vasco and Catalonia in the late 2010’s. They came close to supplanting PP in the election in April 2019 but have since been swallowed by PP, further entrenching the liberalism of PP and are now a dead party.
Vox - The Spanish nationalist party, who consumed the Ciudadanos anti-separatist vote whilst benefitting from a rising concern over immigration. However, as we all know from the UK, their professed social conservatism is incompatible with their economic liberalism and they themselves will be in danger of irrelevance post July if they aren’t prepared to dump the economic liberalism that has dominated right wing discourse across Europe.
No sooner had the campaigners and supporters of PP awoken blurry eyed after toasting a triumph (or PSOE voters drank away their despondency), than PSOE leader Pedro Sanchez called a snap election for July 23rd. What was looking like a December election has been altered to get it all over before the summer and given us a short sharp race.
More annoyingly, your humble writer’s Spanish language diploma is also in July, so instead of bringing you field reports across Spain from December, it’s bite-sized pintxos here.
After PSOE’s disastrous municipal and regional election results (which will be covered in detail in your June issue of the physical magazine), many will question the logic of going for an election now. Already, eleven page Twitter threads have been made by people shilling books to help you understand the nuances of how we got here.
Indeed, there are many interesting factors: a motion of no confidence in 2018 that led to Sanchez becoming Prime Minister at the head of a coalition but denied the chance to win a clear electoral victory to gain a majority of his own, as well as the collapse of Ciudadanos that allowed the traditional liberal party of Partido Popular to hoover up and concentrate the Centre Right vote to maximum effect whilst the smorgasbord of Left wing parties have all hurt each other by failing to pass electoral thresholds across Spain.
You could even make the case that Sanchez will seek to use the fact that Vox (called Far Right by mainstream news outlets) will be needed to allow PP to gain councils and regional assemblies weeks before the national election, motivating the base of PSOE to get out and vote to stop it at a national level and forcing other left wing parties to unite on one list so as not to waste votes.
But there is a clear and simple reason why Sanchez has gone now: he is a politician. If the election were in December, PSOE would’ve binned him off, elected a new leader in September and gone ahead without him. Now they are stuck with him. Enoch Powell once said a party is not the personal property of its leader, but for this election PSOE are set to be the prisoners of Pedro Sanchez.
