The Spanish Right Was Doomed From the Start

When the leader of your conservtive party is a clone of the leader of the Left opposition party you know you're in trouble. PP should've stood as a Bloc of the Right with VOX.

From The European Conservative

By Jorge González-Gallarza

While a PP voter is the closest thing to a VOX voter, a PP leader—at least Feijóo—is the closest thing to a PSOE leader.

To defeat the ruling far-Left, PP and VOX should have run as a bloc instead of against one another.

On Sunday around midnight, with the last few locales vote-counting Spain’s way to a hung parliament that virtually no poll had predicted, I sat dejected on the backseat of a jam-packed Uber van rolling through downtown Madrid. A two-month inebriating spell of gung-ho eagerness, giddy stumping, and the complacency bred by in-the-bag forecasts was screeching to a halt. The verdict was proportionately sobering. However unpopular most polls had gauged it to be (as well as our own gut feeling and—yes—our sense of moral decency), Europe’s leftmost government perhaps wouldn’t come to an end after all. Aside from PM Pedro Sánchez’s ghastly guile and cunning, the deep drivers behind this electoral shock remain shrouded in mystery. If four years of pledge-breaking deals with secessionists, nonstop neo-Marxist cultural hegemony, left-globalist social engineering, and constant assaults on Spain’s constitutional unity hadn’t swung the election our way, then what could? The last hope to halt my country’s lurch to the abyss, in other words, had just withered away abruptly. Four years from now, there probably won’t even be a Spain—as we know it—to speak of.

Along with an Italian MEP, a Hungarian minister, and an assorted squad of think-tankers and activists, we watched the exit polls trickle in at the intellectual arm of the conservative VOX party. By 10 p.m., those results pointed to the unthinkable. The Right’s parliamentary fusion, contrary to most predictions, would fall short of the 176 seats needed to form a cabinet. The right-of-center Partido Popular (PP) rose 46 seats to claim 136—short of the 150-ish it hoped for—whereas VOX dropped precipitously 19 seats, from 52 to 33, amounting to a right-wing bloc of 169. The PP had technically won the election and VOX had successfully remained the nation’s third-largest party—but this time good wasn’t good enough.

What’s worse, the chances that Sánchez will lead a new left-wing bloc into reaching that same threshold are by no means assured, but bewilderingly higher than foretold. Though the scenario is still hanging by a thread, that Sánchez will patch together a supermajority before the summer’s end seems a likelier scenario than the alternative, a repeat election. Sánchez’s PSOE, against all odds, roughly held on to its 2019 result of 122 seats through gains in Catalonia and the Basque Country, whilst its far-left partner Sumar claimed 31 and the usual motley of left-regionalist kingmaker parties hiked the count to 172. This time around, he will need the votes of Junts, the right-regionalist party of Catalonia’s former President, Carles Puigdemont. Puigdemont is a fugitive in Belgium, and speculation runs high already that Sánchez’s secessionist would-be partners will demand a redux of the 2017 illegal independence referendum and for the remaining culprits behind the last one to be released from prison and allowed to run for office again.

The result was outright calamitous for anyone hoping to dislodge the alliance of left-populists and secessionists ruling the country since 2019, but you wouldn’t believe it by watching the election’s narrow winner greet the outcome. The scenes at PP’s headquarters were ironic and surreal. Mere days before, Alberto Nuñez Feijóo had cockily speculated what ministers he would appoint and declined to show up at a four-way debate for fear of eroding his insuperable poll numbers. Towards 11 p.m. on Sunday, he stepped out euphorically on the balcony of c/ Génova, 13 to a crowd that soon began chanting the name of Madrid’s regional governor, Isabel Díaz Ayuso. The scene couldn’t be more revelatory. Feijóo’s campaign had relentlessly demonized VOX as a fringe outlet of unexperienced populists. Yet given the unlikely scenario of a PP supermajority, Santiago Abascal’s party was the only partner that could have hoisted Feijóo to Moncloa. The former Galician governor even suggested he’d be more willing to strike a deal with 20 MPs from PSOE’s moderate faction than with VOX. The crowd’s shouts weren’t anodyne. At May’s regional-cum-local races a mere two months earlier, Ayuso had scored an absolute majority in Madrid with no open jabs at VOX, despite the right-populist party having vetoed her budget at the year’s start. The scene was revelatory of a truism that is fast taking shape on the Spanish Right: while a PP voter is the closest thing to a VOX voter, a PP leader—at least Feijóo, if not Ayuso—is the closest thing to a PSOE leader.

The chief factor behind the right’s paltry showing was not, therefore, turnout. By forsaking the last four remaining months of his mandate after the May race and calling a snap election mid-summer, Pedro Sánchez surely hadn’t help sunbathers turn out—especially not the right’s. Meanwhile, the cornucopia of right-friendly polls predicting a PP-VOX supermajority bred complacency, particularly among young and less-committed voters. Yet at the end of the day, no less than 11 million voters turned out for the right—8 million for PP, 3 million for VOX—not a long shot from the aggregate turnout at May’s right-wing tsunami, when PP and VOX together dislodged PSOE from several of its old fiefdoms. No, the two deep drivers behind the result seem to be (1) PSOE unexpectedly holding the line and (2) the cross-party demonization of VOX (the two are related). By relentlessly sounding the alarm that a PP-VOX government would ‘set Spain back decades’ on gender equality, environmentalism, and even tolerance of minorities, Sánchez succeeded in turning out scores of non-committed voters that polls were simply discounting. This “No Pasarán” shibboleth worked particularly well in Catalonia and the Basque Country, where PSOE tapped into the voting base of parties it had been allied with in government and even made ample concessions to.

This anti-VOX demonization campaign fed PSOE’s performance even when befuddlingly adopted by … PP. Spain’s electoral system is territorial, with each province assigned a number of seats in parliament according to population. In provinces where the allotted seats were being disputed between PP and PSOE, VOX voters, rather than risk casting a useless ballot, chose to vote strategically for the party best placed to defeat the left, in numbers large enough to give PP a clear edge. Yet in those provinces, primarily in the two Castilles and in nearby Extremadura, where it was VOX instead of PP that stood to snatch seats from PSOE, PP voters largely followed Feijóo’s calls and refused to reciprocate. The contest for votes between PP and VOX, therefore, was not a zero-sum game, but a game where absent cooperation, the two parties stood to lose—which they did. This is to say nothing of the media arm of this campaign waged by PP-friendly figures such as renowned radio anchorman Federico Jiménez Losantos. In his radio broadcasts listened to by a several-million audience of mostly retirees, Losantos has waged a bitter personal vendetta against several VOX’s leaders. He blames Santiago Abascal, Rocío Monasterio, and Iván Espinosa for preaching the gospel of Spanish unity and social conservatism with a certain egotistic self-centeredness, as if the millions of voters who believe the same yet still vote for PP were somehow equivocating. The PP’s affiliate think-tank, FAES, in a shocking piece published Monday, has laid the disastrous result on VOX’s feet alone, blaming its right-populist competitor for scaring centrist voters from voting PP. And yet, according to internal polling, about 80% of the combined PP-VOX vote would have liked to see the two parties govern in coalition.

VOX’s reaction to the result was no less stage-managed, almost theatrical. As we left the think-tank’s offices on Sunday night, packed into that Uber, for the headquarters of the party proper, we were greeted by a surreally festive crowd that epitomized VOX’s base voter, if not his reaction to the result. VOX is a tragic, almost LARP-like enterprise, whose foot soldiers are so motioned by rage at the parties to its left that they hail VOX as the very last hope for Spain, even when the party loses over half a million votes relative to 2019. The question on their mind looms large over the party’s future. On one hand, VOX could stick to aspiring to be a junior partner to a party that vilifies it as a danger to Spain’s governability (and that has utterly failed to snatch that governability away from lawbreaking secessionists). On the other, it could simply ease a PP-PSOE alliance and let PP burn itself out—so as to emerge as the only true alternative. If the party changes tack going forward, it should be to that latter strategy.