Depending on how you look at the result of yesterday’s general election in Spain, either everyone won or no one won. It had been called five months early by outgoing Socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez, who hoped to block a resurgent Spanish right after its emphatic victories in regional elections on 28 May.
The vote drew 70.4 per cent of the population to the polls, 4.2 per cent more than in 2019. This was a surprisingly high turnout for the middle of summer, when a lot of Spaniards are either on holiday or sheltering from the intense heat.
Prolonged political freezes, sleep-walking governments and prop-up arrangements have become the norm
The Conservative Popular party (PP) came first, winning 33.1 per cent of the vote and 136 seats in the national congress, up from the 89 it secured in 2019. The PSOE, Sanchez’s party, came second with 31.7 per cent and upped its seats by two to 122, a much stronger result than many pundits were expecting.
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