With elections less than three weeks away, Spain’s centre-right Partido Popular (PP) is betting on a milquetoast program of centre-right politics to win the day.
The party’s head, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, took his campaign promises to the public on Tuesday, July 4th, highlighting what he knows for some are intentionally soft ambitions.
“Repealing sanchismo implies repealing wrong laws and measures. There have been a few,” he said in reference to the current government. “But I do not want to govern with a vengeance of any kind. I’m running to beat Sánchez—roundly—but not to avenge myself.”
In his four years at the nation’s helm, Pedro Sánchez’s socialist government has legalised euthanasia; made self-identification of sex the law of the land; released rapists from prison; allowed minors to have abortions without their parent’s knowledge; implemented a labour law reform that masks unemployment; politicised the judicial system; attempted to impede the exercise of conscientious objection by doctors; disastrously intervened in the housing market; eroded private property rights and politicised Spanish history.
Regional elections in May signalled that most of the country had tired of this “sanchismo,” and demonstrations earlier in the year manifested a deep concern in Spanish society about not only the social policies of Sánchez’s government but also its authoritarian slide.
The question has been how far back to the Right can Spain swing.
“Spain is a country basically centrist,” noted long-time journalist and director of the conservative newspaper El Debate, Bietio Rubido, following the PP’s historic win and VOX’s disappointing results in Andalucia’s regional elections in 2022. “There are neither five million far-left extremists nor a countless number on the conservative Right.”
And so Feijóo offered a centrist government, one in line with a society where certain social-moral instincts have shifted Left compared to decades ago when euthanasia, for example, was nearly unthinkable.
Under the PP, Feijóo announced, the euthanasia law will not be annulled but merely reformed and the abortion liberalisation would only be curbed to require minors to have parental consent. Labour laws that the socialist government has used to whitewash the country’s poor employment situation would remain in place. The only socialist-installed policies Feijóo committed to repealing were the communist-inspired Housing Law that allowed for rent regulation in declared stress zones, the Democratic Memory Law that institutionalised the political use of Spanish history, and the Trans Law that allows for self-selection of sex in the civil registry.
But even these promised reversals are somewhat ameliorated. Feijóo promised a new law that “guarantees the rights of transsexual people” while “seeking consensus” among all social and professional sectors.
He speaks to a country where the bulk of voters are neither ready to fight a conservative culture war nor be mobilised by the weaponization of national history and identity, whether done by the Left or a reactionary Right encapsulated in VOX.
The centrist platform gives the party room to grab the left-leaning swing voter while appealing to the instinct of the largest part of the Spanish Right, which, though alarmed by the current government, is not charmed by the strident rhetoric of VOX and would welcome the return to a certain business-as-usual calm in the country, following several years of political instability caused by the emergence of third parties, both Right and Left of centre. For many, the PP is also a ‘useful’ vote, not wasted in the landscape of a divided Right. Though, because of how votes are calculated by region in Spain, voting for VOX could, in some regions, be more effective shifting parliamentary seats to the Right.
Leveraging patriotism with an amiable tone, he pledged his governance would be a “profound exercise to rebuild national unity” and a moment “to turn the page on this stage, recover calm, and leave the troubles, shocks, and divisions behind.”
“I don’t want to win to completely nullify anyone. The vendettas, the sectarianism, the egos—my intention is that they also leave with the current president and the current government,” he said. “I just want to play for my country. I want to be the president of all Spaniards. It is everyone’s time.”
He also, of course, promised to lower taxes on the middle class.
The saying goes that what is every man’s is no man’s. But in this case, the election will most likely go to the PP’s.
The question remains, by how much will the PP win the elections? It’s been polling ahead of the main socialist party, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español, for weeks, but by a slim margin. Additionally, since the Left and Right are now divided with the smaller Unidas Podemos and VOX on the margins, the results of the smaller parties play an important role in whether the Right or Left gains an overall majority and ultimately gets installed as the head of the executive branch.
Finally, in Spain there is one more wildcard—the Basque and Catalan nationalist parties. In tight elections such as the last general elections, their handful of votes can be key in tipping the scales. In the circus of recent Spanish politics, Sánchez is a ruthless political survivor who has proven willing to enter any coalition or pact that will keep him in power. Given the variety of small adjustments that could seriously influence election results, post-election negotiations could be as important as the election results themselves.
With these factors in mind, and the probable necessity of any winner having to seek support from another party to form a government, both Sánchez and Feijóo have positioned themselves as the alternative to governments of the opposite ‘extreme.’
Feijóo is also leveraging into a plea and a promise to aim for a PP solo government.
“I will call on the leader of the PSOE, whoever he is, to let me govern, and if he doesn’t, I will call on each and every one of his ‘barons’ (PSOE´s regional presidents) to convince him,” Feijóo said.
So far, the PSOE has ruled out any possibility of standing down to let a PP government take over, instead showing itself willing to enter a coalition with the Sumar, Spain’s latest iteration of far-left politics.
While the PP has made it clear it prefers to govern alone, in forming regional governments over the last month it has ceded to coalitions with VOX when necessary.
The rise of third parties has permanently changed Spain’s political landscape, making every election a complicated dance on a crowded stage.
