Ángel Collado
The short-lived victory in the regional elections in Castilla y León on 13 February, Pablo Casado’s last mistake as the inducer of the call and protagonist of the campaign, has forced the Partido Popular to institutionalise relations with Vox.
The extreme right-wing party, the third political force in Spain behind the Socialists and the Popular Party, enters for the first time into a regional executive with a pact in which it renounces its populist postulates. The agreement serves the PP to “naturalise” an understanding, for the moment local, aimed at being able to compete with the bloc of leftists and separatists that keeps Pedro Sánchez in power.
Vox, a party that was originally nourished by leaders who had split from the PP, such as its own president Santiago Abascal, had so far not sought to enter the regional administrations and was content to make demands to condition the PP’s regional executives from the outside. In the Castilla y León elections it changed its strategy and, with 17 per cent of the votes and the 13 seats won at the polls without which it could not form a government, it has managed to enter the coalition executive to be headed by the popular Alfonso Fernández Mañueco.
A rise of Vox in the elections that would end up conditioning the next regional government of the PP was Sánchez’s first hope to alleviate the effects of the PSOE’s foreseeable defeat in the February elections. The minimum objective is now being met and, with Sánchez at the helm, the entire political and media apparatus of the government is now focusing on the basic argument against a PP that is seen as being handed over to the extreme right.
The socialists’ script is set for the rest of the legislature: to present their leader as the only option against a right-wing that they consider anti-democratic and even link to Francoism, with the aim of stopping the alternation of power in the next general elections.
The challenge for the PP is to counter Sánchez’s campaign with the constant reminder of who the partners of the current government are: the populist extreme left of Podemos with five communist ministers in government. In addition, there is the support in Congress of the entire bloc of pro-independence parties that includes the groups that promoted the coup attempt in Catalonia in 2017 such as ERC and the heirs of the political arm of the terrorist group ETA: Bildu.
If Sánchez has normalised relations with the most extremist parties in the House, and even whitewashes the coup perpetrators and former pro-ETA supporters with pardons and prison benefits, the PP is now trying to make a coalition government in Castilla y León with Vox look natural. But it has to do so as if it were a purely local condition, so as not to lose out in the next regional elections in Andalusia, which are due to be held before the end of the year.
Although the message of fear of the extreme right did not work for the PSOE in the Madrid elections or in Castilla y León, the Socialists are confident that it will help them in Andalusia, their former electoral fiefdom lost three years ago in the face of the understanding of the entire centre right: PP and Ciudadanos in a coalition government, with the abstention of Vox.
The future president of the Partido Popular, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has taken up this legacy of Pablo Casado (the dependence on Santiago Abascal’s party) as something inevitable that he intends to remedy in the future with a renewed project that brings together the entire centre-right. Casado himself had left Fernández Mañueco’s hands free to sign the necessary pacts in order to avoid new elections in the region.
In order to enter the regional executive, Vox has had to sign a pact that does not include its populist proposals to reject immigrants or suppress public subsidies to trade unions, parties and social or feminist organisations. Abascal’s party has gone from opposing the autonomous state to proposing its suppression to demanding positions and responsibilities in the first autonomous government in which they are decisive.
Both parties, PP and Vox, need their coalition cabinet, beyond ideological labels, to work to address citizens’ problems in order to maintain their respective voting expectations in future general elections.
The problem for the Partido Popular is that the electoral sociology of Castilla y León is overwhelmingly favourable to its acronym and has little to do with that of Spain as a whole. In the regional elections, PP, Vox and Ciudadanos won 53 per cent of the vote compared to 35 per cent for the left: PSOE and Podemos. If in the next general elections Vox continues to rise (it already reached 15 per cent in 2019) at the expense of the Popular Party and the centre-right vote continues to be scattered as it was three years ago, Sánchez can guarantee his re-election at the head of his entire investiture bloc, the left and the independentistas.
