Stalemate

Vox party’s hardline attitudes appear to have turned off Spanish voters

Amid internal recriminations over the party’s collapse, the mainstream conservative People’s party (PP) has also been distancing itself from Vox. The PP, which had been expected in the run-up to the election to form a coalition with Vox, emerged as overall winner but is now unable to form a government.

By aligning itself with the far right, the PP has banished any hope of a coalition with conservative Basque and Catalan nationalists, who have supported minority PP governments in the past but will not countenance entering into a coalition that includes Vox.

Pedro Sánchez, the acting prime minister and Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE) leader, will attempt to stay in his job by winning a vote in the parliament that requires an absolute majority of 176 of the 350 seats.

As he has no overall majority, this is likely to go to a second vote 48 hours later, when only a simple majority is required. However, he will still need the votes of Junts per Catalunya (Together for Catalonia), the conservative nationalist party led by the former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont.

After nearly six years of self-imposed exile in Belgium, Puigdemont had been fading into irrelevance before the election, which has given him an opportunity to return to the limelight. However, his demands – for an amnesty for all those charged in relation to the illegal 2017 declaration of independence and for a binding referendum on Catalan independence – are politically impossible for Sánchez to accept.

If Sánchez cannot form a government this month, Spain will go to the polls again in December, the sixth general election in seven years.