When will Spain’s political paralysis end?

Sunday’s general election in Spain was supposed to answer the question: will Spain be governed for the next four years by a right-wing coalition or by a left-wing coalition? If the question was easy to understand, the answer certainly isn’t. Like the four previous general elections, this one was inconclusive – only even more so. 

The right-wing Partido Popular won 136 seats and Vox, even further to the right, won 33, giving a Partido Popular/Vox coalition a total of 169 seats – fewer than most polls had predicted. Unfortunately for the just over 11 million Spaniards who voted for these two parties, this leaves them seven seats short: in a 350-seat parliament, 176 is the number needed for a majority. 

For the right-wing alliance then this will almost certainly prove to be a hugely frustrating case of ‘so near but yet so far’. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the Partido Popular, has vowed to ask parliament to vote him in as the new prime minister, but it seems that the right-wing bloc will only be able to count on the support of two small regional parties, each with just one seat.