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Date Published: 29/05/2023

Spain election results: Country takes a decisive swing to the right

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The overwhelming victory for the Spanish conservatives has led the Socialists to bring forward the 2023 general election

Spain election results: Country takes a decisive swing to the right

This Sunday May 28, there were municipal and regional elections all around Spain to vote for who will govern in the Ayuntamiento Town Halls and in the governments of the Autonomous Communities.

With more than 97% of the votes already counted, the provisional election results show a massive win for the conservative Partido Popular (PP), and a slap in the face by reality for the Socialist PSOE party, who are in power at a national level in the central government, in coalition with the far-left Podemos party, who also lost out spectacularly in the regional and municipal elections.

Such has been the extent of the PSOE’s defeat that President of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, has announced that the general elections which were to be held in December will now be brought forward by a full six months to July 23, the earliest time legally possible.

The new Town Hall and Regional government teams will be sworn in on June 17, until which time the parties may negotiate to make coalition governments where they can.

In Madrid, both the PP Mayor of the Town Hall, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, and the PP Regional President, José Luis Martínez Almeida, have held onto power with convincing majorities and will both be able to govern without needing to make pacts with any other parties.

In Barcelona, the long-standing incumbent Mayor Ada Colau has lost out to former Mayor Xavier Trias, both of whom are Independents, though Colau could still govern if she makes a pact with the second-place Collboni. In both Catalonia and the Basque Country, the Independent parties have predictably retained their majorities, in contrast with the PP-PSOE hegemony seen in the rest of the country.

The Valencian Community has taken a swing from the left to the right, with the PSOE being ousted by the PP, though they will need to form a coalition government with the far-right VOX party, which has also seen huge wins elsewhere in the country.

It’s a similar story in the Balearic Islands (including Mallorca, Menorca and Ibiza), where it’s likely that the PP and VOX will form an alliance to govern for the next four years.

In Andalusia, the reigning PP will see their power further strengthened with victories in all provincial capitals with the exception of Jaén and in big cities like Jerez de la Frontera and Marbella.

This is also the case in the Region of Murcia, where the PP have won in all three of the province’s cities and retained a convincing hold on power at the regional level too.

The results of these regional and municipal elections are likely to be a forerunner of what we can expect in the general elections in two months’ time, when we likely see the formation of a new Spanish government led by the PP’s Alberto Núñez Feijóo, with or without the help in coalition from VOX’s Santiago Abascal.

Image: Alberto Núñez Feijóo / Twitter

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