The insinuation of potential voter fraud implicit in comments by conservative Partido Popular (PP) leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo, saying Spanish postal workers should count votes independently from their bosses, has sparked a war of words in the final week of campaigning ahead of Sunday’s election. Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez accused Feijóo of “Trumpism” and of casting a shadow over the election process.
The centre-right PP has a commanding lead ahead of this weekend’s snap election amid speculation that it is considering a potential coalition with the populist VOX party.
Speaking at a rally last week, PP leader Feijóo asked workers with the state-owned postal company Correos to do their democratic duty and work free from intimidation by their employers or union officials.
Conservatives are perhaps right to worry after police busted a network of socialist activists operating in the Spanish territory of Melilla last May attempting to rig local elections using postal votes in favour of pro-Moroccan candidates.
While Feijóo subsequently clarified his remarks, saying that he did not mean to insinuate that the election could be rigged, his comments feed into a wider conservative feud with the postal services and fears that the election could be tipped against them. Last Wednesday alone, 94,000 Spaniards registered for postal voting in what by any standard is a remarkably strange surge in last-minute registration potentially motivated by the election happening in peak vacation season.
A record two and a half million Spaniards are expected to vote by post this week in an unexpected spike in postal registration, approximately double what was seen in 2019. The spike has unnerved conservatives who fear the influence of separatists and left-wing unions on the postal services as well as wider issues of a bottleneck as a Thursday deadline approaches to cast postal votes.
The Spanish Right has made a particular point about the risk of vote rigging following the botched Catalan independence referendum of 2017 as the nationalist VOX party accused separatists and PSOE of working with a covert network of Russian assets, corrupt party bosses, and George Soros to undermine Spanish unity as part of their campaign mudslinging.
Spanish politics has been on edge over the past year following the Pegasus spyware scandal and accusations of bugging against separatist activists by the Spanish intelligence services.
On the campaign trail this week, socialist leader Pedro Sánchez departed a Latin American trade summit in Brussels and rushed home for some final campaigning. Sánchez and his PSOE party have fended off accusations of siding with Catalan separatism the entire campaign. The latest opinion polls show a 14% jump for the conservative opposition relative to their 2019 results amid speculation that Spanish working-class voters are breaking with the left.
According to political pundits, PSOE has struggled throughout the campaign to engage with its base. Most experts predict a comfortable PP victory in what could open the doors for a coalition with the populist VOX.
