Spanish PM's Socialists win snap election
But far-right Vox party retains 24 seats, a sizable parliamentary share
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's Socialist Workers' Party won the country's general election on Sunday, but will have to figure out how to form a coalition after it failed to secure enough votes for a majority in the parliament.
Sanchez's party obtained 123 seats out of the 350 in the Parliament, or close to 29 percent of the votes, a major advance from the 85 seats it won in the 2016 election.
"The future has won and the past has lost," Sanchez told supporters on Sunday night, adding that his party's big challenges were to fight inequality, advance co-existence and halt corruption.
"We will form a pro-European government to strengthen Europe, not to weaken it," he said.
The far-right Vox party won 24 seats in Parliament. The Vox party, set up five years ago, holds a stance against feminism, illegal immigration and separatists in Catalonia.
"This is just the beginning," Vox leader Santiago Abascal Conde said after first results were announced. "We have a voice in Congress, a voice that didn't exist before, " he said.
It was the third general election in Spain in the last four years. Voter turnout hit 75.8 percent, up 9 percent from 2016.
The conservative Popular party was the biggest loser. It won only 66 seats compared to 137 in the previous election. It also lost seats to the center-right Ciudadanos party, which seized 57 seats.
Sanchez, who took office in June, must seek coalition partners to form a new government. He is likely to seek an alliance with the far-left Podemos party led by Pablo Iglesias, which won 42 seats.
Iglesias said he is open to joining a Socialist-led coalition. "I have expressed to him (Sanchez)... our willingness to work toward a coalition government," he told supporters.
But even with the support of Podemos, the Socialists would still be 11 seats short of the 176-seat majority needed to govern.
Seeking alliances
Sanchez, 47, must also seek alliances with smaller parties and decide whether he wants to make agreements with Catalan and other separatist parties - a move that could anger many Spaniards and risk furthering support for the far right, whose rise has been attributed in part to a backlash against the Catalan independence movement.
Sanchez told supporters on Sunday night that the only conditions he would place on forming a coalition government would be "respecting the constitution and promoting social justice".
Andres Ortega Klein, a senior research fellow at the Madridbased Elcano Royal Institute, told China Daily on Monday that Sanchez would like to govern alone with support from on both sides, but the position of Albert Rivera (Ciudadanos party) "makes it impossible to count on him for the investiture, so he will have to agree with Podemos that he wants to enter into a coalition government".
Klein believes it unlikely that the Socialists will seek the active support of the Catalan separatists.
Sanchez has taken a tough stance against Catalan independence, saying in a rally on Friday in Barcelona that there would be "no referendum and no independence".
"Although all this situation can generate political instability in the medium term, we will see a government that will continue in what has been done in recent months, with measures to the left, economic and social, and modernization," Klein said.
He described the advance by the Vox party as "the contaminated right". "It will be an annoying voice in the new Parliament," he said.
In Brussels, Frans Timmermans, first vice-president of the European Commission, congratulated Sanchez in a tweet on Sunday night, saying this is "a victory for solidarity, fairness, dialogue, equality, sustainability".
"This is what many Europeans crave. This is what socialists and social democrats will fight for in the EU elections", said Timmermans, a Dutch politician who is a candidate for the European Commission president next month.
France24 contributed to this story.
chenweihua@chinadaily.com.cn
(China Daily 04/30/2019 page12)
