Socialists set to win Spain’s snap election but fall short of majority: poll

A voter intention poll conducted for EL PAÍS shows the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) clearly winning the general election of April 28, but falling well short of the absolute majority in a fragmented Congress.

According to the pollster 40dB, the party led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez would earn 122 seats, representing 27.1% of the vote, and would be eight percentage points ahead of the Popular Party (PP), which would have 76 representatives in the lower house.

This will be the third general election in Spain in less than three-and-a-half years. Sánchez, who has only been in power since June, was forced to call a snap election when he failed to secure enough support for his 2019 budget plan. He has been leading a minority government ever since he won a no-confidence vote against Mariano Rajoy of the PP.

Because neither one of Spain’s main parties is expected to obtain a large enough majority to form a government, the winner will need support from smaller regional nationalist parties, nearly all of which are currently in open confrontation with right-of-center groups.

The survey shows only two options for a stable executive: one is a renewed alliance of the same congressional groups that came together in the no-confidence vote last May. That initiative attracted support from the leftist Unidos Podemos alliance and from nationalist parties from the Basque Country, Valencia, the Canary Islands and Catalonia, including the separatist Catalan Republican Left (ERC) and Catalan European Democratic Party (PdeCAT).

The other option is a pact between the PSOE and Ciudadanos, one of the new parties to emerge from Spain’s protracted economic crisis. But at the moment an alliance of these two groups appears unlikely. In February, Ciudadanos leaders said they would not seek any deals with Pedro Sánchez or his party after the election, in protest over the prime minister’s efforts at talks with “those who perpetrated a coup in Catalonia,” alluding to the unilateral independence declaration of late 2017.

What the poll clearly confirms is that Spain’s established two-party system is over. The system began cracking in 2015, with the emergence of the protest parties Podemos and Ciudadanos. And now there is another contender in the race: the far-right party Vox, which entered the regional parliament of Andalusia in December and now hopes to replicate this success on April 28 and on May 26, when Spain will hold local, regional and European elections.

According to this latest poll, Vox would win 10.2% of the vote at the general election, giving it 31 seats in Congress. If so, it will be the first time since the return of democracy in the late 1970s that the far right has gained such representation in Spanish politics.