Edition 277
www.thecourier.es
Friday 24th June 2016
SECOND TIME LUCKY? Spain Votes Again On Sunday
BY ALEX TRELINSKI
A
fter a December general election stalemate, Spanish voters will be trooping off to the polls for the second time in six months this Sunday (June 26th) knowing that it’s a racing certainty that a similar result will come out of the plastic voting boxes if the opinion polls
have got it right. 176 seats are needed to get an overall majority in the Madrid parliament but a Metroscopia poll published last weekend showed the right-wing Partido Popular under acting prime minister, Mariano Rajoy (pictured topleft) losing up to 10 seats on the December vote, down
from 123 to a range between 113 and 116. The big change involves Unidos Podemos, the joint Podemos-United Left electoral alliance, under Pablo Iglesias (pictured bottom-left) which is projected to get between 92 and 95 seats, a rise of up to 24 seats compared to their combined total of 71 in December, and 10 seats clear of the PSEO socialist party under Pedro Sanchez (top-right) which would come third on a projected 78 to 85 seats compared to 90 in December. The centrist anticorruption Ciudadanos party, led by Albert Rivera (bottomright) would be fourth again on a range of 37 to 41 seats, one seat down on December’s vote. Other opinion polls paint the same broad picture. Spain operates on a proportional representation system with delegates to the Madrid congress being picked via regional lists, which is in complete contrast to the UK Westminster “first past the post” vote with one MP being elected per constituency. It does though mean that forecasting a percentage vote and seats for a general election in Spain is not as complicated and fraught with unpredictability as in the British electoral system. Based on the Metroscopia poll, only two possible twoparty coalitions come close to or just over an overall
majority in the poll. Firstly a left of centre UP-PSOE alliance (170-180 seats), though the PSOE strongly disagree over the Podemos position over holding a referendum on independence for Catalunya. In theory, the PSOE could join forces with the PP (191-201 seats) but that’s viewed as even more unlikely because of the traditional hatred between both parties. A PP-Ciudadanos minority government would also be possible (150-157 seats) but only if the PSOE abstained, but that link up looks remote based on what the Ciudadnos leader Albert Rivera has said about corruption issues involving the PP and the current leader, Mariano Rajoy. Speaking this week Rajoy, against a possible shock victory by the Podemos alliance calling on “all moderate, sensible and balanced voters to unite” in order to ensure that Podemos does not pull off what would be an astonishing win for a party formed just two years ago. Meanwhile in an interview with the newspaper El Mundo published on Tuesday, Pablo Iglesias, the leader of Podemos, reached out to the PSOE by saying that a Catalan referendum would not be a “red line” in the next parliament. For his part, the PSOE’s Mr Sánchez has reiterated his refusal to join a potential grand coalition with the PP.