Will Spain get a right-wing conservative, national-populist coalition at 2023 election?

🔊 Organisations that monitor the state of democracies in the world warned last year of a trend towards far-right, anti-pluralist or nativist options.

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In 2023, Spain will hold local and regional ballots in May and a general election in December (unless Sánchez decides to go early) but will not be the only country to vote: Nigeria, Turkey, Pakistan, Argentina, Estonia, Finland, New Zealand, Guatemala, Poland, Congo and Thailand will also all do so at some point during the year.

The latest version of the Economist’s Democracy Index, though, published last February for 2021, noted that less than half the people in the world lived in a democracy somewhere in the world, that Spain had been downgraded from a “full” to a “flawed” democracy and that a majority of countries had suffered some kind of worsening of their situation. “A new low for global democracy” was the headline for one of their articles.

A V-Dem report published last March noted that “the last 30 years of democratic advances are now eradicated” and that “dictatorships are on the rise and harbour 70% of the world population—5.4 billion people”. They noted “toxic levels of polarization” had increased in 40 countries, enabling “anti-pluralist leaders” to win power, and freedom of speech and deliberation scores were declining in more than 30 countries.

“While democracy is being used as protection against Russian irredentism”, said the Global State of Democracy report, “voters in many longstanding democracies in Europe are increasingly supporting far-right and nativist parties that disregard some of the basic principles of democracy, such as press freedom or the inclusion of minorities in decision making”. The far-right or radical right nativist party in Spain would be Vox.

In the United States, as well as the second anniversary of the Trump-MAGA insurrection on January 6, 2021, we have just witnessed a very polarised, 15-round vote for Speaker of the House of Representatves, which US media report is the longest vote since the Civil War ended 157 years ago. The New York Times reported McCarthy (a republican) had won “after concessions to [the] hard right”. One analysis on CNN opened with “Kevin McCarthy is the latest Republican leader to find out that it’s impossible to get ahead of his party’s inexorable march to its far-right extremes”.

As well as that global trend, it is, shall we say, Vox’s “turn” in Spain to see if it can have a go at winning power as the next new party from the past 10 years. That cycle began with Podemos at the 2014 European elections and then continued with Ciudadanos through the general elections in 2015, 2016 and 2019 (twice). Almost ten years on, Podemos is weakend and splitting after Pablo Iglesias gave up and left politics in 2021 and Ciudadanos is in danger of going to zero across the country this year, as it did at the regional ballot in Andalusia last June, losing all of its seats.

The past four years have seen the first coalition government in modern Spanish history, since the end of Franco’s dictatorship in the 1970s, and Spaniards will now get a chance to score the left-wing effort between the Socialist Party and Podemos. These will be the first national elections after all of the suffering and chaos caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Will national sentiment swing back towards the right and give Spain a conservative-national-populist coalition by the end of the year, or will the left be able to defend its position?

The latest polls have the Popular Party on just over 30% of the vote but stagnated now following the excitement surrounding the appointment of their new leader, Feijóo, last year. 30% would be a 10-point increase on the PP’s 2019 result but is not enough to win a majority. Vox is running third in the polls, on 15%, which is the same level as in 2019 for them. Together they likely would have a comfortable majority in parliament with those numbers and, importantly in Spain, would not depend on regional nationalists to legislate and govern, but how would an ultra-conservative or conservative-far-right coalition be received in Brussels, London and Washington?

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