Spain’s leader cracks whip on squabbling coalition partners by calling snap election
MADRID — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s surprise decision to call a snap election breaks apart the coalition he built with the far-left United We Can party, marking a line in the sand with a movement born of grassroots activism but whose electoral fortunes have nosedived.
On Monday, Sánchez brought forward a national election expected in December to July 23 after the conservative Popular Party, or PP, and far-right Vox movement dramatically increased their vote share in local and regional elections Sunday.
Sánchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, or PSOE, has led a minority government with United We Can since 2019, but arguments with his coalition partners have increasingly dominated headlines. United We Can’s leadership is also engaged in a separate feud with Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz, who has started her own political movement, Sumar.
Ernesto Pascual, a political scientist and professor at UOC, a university based in Barcelona, said the prime minister wanted to force the hand of the poorly performing, squabbling groupings to the left of his own party, to clarify who had the capacity and will to govern the country.
“Pedro Sánchez needs a bloc to his left which is united. So what he does is to prevent United We Can and Sumar from confronting each other anymore,” Pascual said. “He is telling them, ‘Look, these are the electoral results. Either you unite or it is going to be a disaster.’”
The shock tactic seemed to have an immediate effect: United We Can’s leader, Ione Belarra, has already announced a reboot of negotiations with Sumar on an electoral pact. Legally, the parties have only until June 9 to apply to run on a joint ticket.
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Although the Socialists’ overall vote share remained largely steady in the local and regional vote, the dire performance of United We Can across the country leaves the coalition with a questionable mandate to continue.
“Pedro Sánchez might read the results as the need to break up the current government hoping that the party still has some leverage to win the national elections in the short term,” said Nagore Calvo Mendizabal, a senior lecturer in Spanish and European Studies at King’s College London.
Sunday marked the nadir of United We Can’s electoral performance since it won its first votes in a European election in 2014.
The party was founded by Spain’s precursor to the Occupy protest movement, and was originally led by university professor Pablo Iglesias. Tackling the austerity politics imposed by the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, United We Can promised policies drawn from grassroots activism and grew to become a national force.
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After joining the coalition government in 2019 with the Socialists, United We Can has focused on issues such as gender identity and LGBTQ+ rights. “These are values that the traditional PSOE electorate does not understand,” said Pascual. “They understand problems like the minimum wage and inflation.”
The party’s combative style has led to furious confrontation with the PP and Vox in parliament. Iglesias officially left politics in 2021, though some see him as still pulling the strings, most recently in negotiations with Sumar over an electoral pact. “Behind is the founding father who refuses to let go of the reins at all,” Pascual said.
Since then, the Socialists and United We Can openly split over changes that the former ordered to a controversial sexual consent law, which had opened a loophole for rapists to have their sentences reduced.
While some will see a return to the two-party politics that dominated Spain until United We Can burst onto the scene, others insist that Spain’s regional parties and the far right are still powerful enough to keep any PP or PSOE government in check without United We Can.
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Sandra León, a political scientist at Madrid’s Carlos III University, said Sánchez has calculated that the disruption of a snap election is worth it to avoid “the costs of internal division in the government until December.”
The overall aim, León and Pascual agreed, is to discombobulate internal and external adversaries. The handful of Socialists who did well in the regional elections are precisely the candidates who might threaten Sánchez’s authority within the PSOE. Meanwhile, voters will be seeing far-right Vox call the shots with the nominally moderate PP in real time in the next few weeks, and may opt to vote for the Socialists to keep Vox from expanding its power in parliament.
There are several complications with the new election date, however. A late July election is unprecedented in a Southern European country like Spain, when many will be on vacation away from their registered voting address and when political parties will be in the middle of negotiating alliances spurred by the local elections.
The central government will also need to deal with taking over the rotating European Union presidency July 1 and ongoing negotiations with the U.K. on a post-Brexit deal for the British enclave of Gibraltar.
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