MADRID (AFP) – Spanish voters headed to the polls to decide whether to hand Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez a fresh four-year mandate or, as polls suggest, bring the right back to power with its far-right ally.
A shift to the right in the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy, mirroring a similar move in Italy last year, would be a huge blow for left-wing parties in Europe.
Nearly all polls and pundits suggest the vote will hand victory to Alberto Nunez Feijoo’s conservative Popular Party (PP) – but surprises could be in store.
By the time the last surveys are published today, around one in five voters were still undecided, and it remains unclear what impact the timing of the vote, held at the height of the summer holidays in the scorching late July heat, will have on the turnout.
As many Spaniards are on holiday, more than 2.47 million – a record number – of the 37.5 million registered voters have cast an absentee ballot, Spain’s postal service said on Saturday.
Polling stations opened at 9am and closed at 8pm, with the results were expected a few hours later.
It has not been a good final week of campaigning for the PP leader, who stumbled over the issue of pensions, boycotted the final televised debate between candidates, and saw a resurgence of troubling questions about his ties with a now-convicted drug dealer in the 1990s.
Even so, “it would be a huge surprise if the PP did not win. But whether it will be able to form a government is another matter”, said a political scientist at Madrid’s Carlos III University Pedro Riera Sagrera.
Feijoo is hoping his party will reach the magic figure of 176 deputies within the 350-seat Parliament, which would allow it to govern on its own, but the polls suggest otherwise.
They show he will likely fall short and have to strike a deal with the only available partner – the far-right Vox, which emerged in 2013 from a split within the PP.
This presents a real challenge for Feijoo, who has built his reputation on being a moderate, but whose party has recently made deals to jointly govern with Vox in local and regional authorities following the right’s triumph in May’s regional elections.
