Spain’s centre-right Partido Popular (PP) is having second thoughts about excluding VOX from any future coalition deal as leftists bemoan the breakdown of a cordon sanitaire against the populist Right in Spanish politics.
The potential of a PP-VOX alliance has become a major theme in the early stages of the Spanish electoral campaign as the country prepares to vote in surprise parliamentary elections on July 23rd.
This snap election was called by socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez after his PSOE Party endured greater-than-expected losses in regional elections last month. He had hoped to catch both VOX and PP unprepared.
Last month’s regional election changed the political landscape in Spain. Leftist parties haemorrhaged votes to both the PP and VOX despite PSOE’s outreach to Catalan and Basque separatists. Sánchez’s decision looks increasingly misjudged as opinion polls show a surge for the PP, with VOX cementing its position as the nation’s third-largest party.
Spanish socialists fear that previous commitments from PP to not cooperate with VOX are breaking down, as both parties increasingly form coalitions with each other at a regional level.
The PP and VOX are already in a coalition agreement to govern the southeastern Spanish region of Valencia. Meanwhile, leftists criticise the appointment of a VOX candidate with Francoist sympathies as the region’s culture minister.
The Spanish Left has been making hay out of a potential deal between the centre and populist Right as Sánchez himself outlined how a PP-VOX coalition would upset the political balance of power in Europe and risk women’s rights, talking to El Páis.
The election is being closely watched in Brussels as Spain prepares to take over the presidency of the European Council. Progressives fear a repeat of the Swedish presidency, where the Swedish Democrats were able to latently influence the Council’s agenda on immigration.
Despite previously ruling out any deal with VOX, the PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo has changed his tune as the PP prepares to sign more regional pacts with VOX.
In a weekend interview with the Times, Núñez Feijóo rejected what he called the “politics of Twitter” and said that the PP would be able to govern alone without the support of VOX, though he did not entirely refute the possibility of forming a coalition government with the national conservative party.
VOX emerged in 2013 as a split from the PP over the issue of Catalonia and grew exponentially following the region’s attempted separation from Spain in 2017. The party sits with the conservative ECR group in the European Parliament and styles itself as a national conservative party intensely hostile to regional separatism.
VOX has, so far, made culture war issues front and centre in its electoral platform, and had successfully dismantled the Department of Equality in the city of Valladolid due to a regional pact it had with the PP.
