left and right neck and neck after the counting of two thirds of the votes

In Spain, the Socialist Party (PSOE), led by the president of the outgoing government, Pedro Sanchez, and the Popular Party (PP, conservatives), led by the Galician Alberto Nuñez Feijoo, were neck and neck, Sunday evening July 23, after the counting of two thirds of the votes in the legislative elections.

The Ministry of the Interior projected, at 10:20 p.m., 132 seats for the right and 126 for the left. In third position, the far-right Vox party was credited with 33 seats, ahead of the left-wing Sumar movement, an ally of Mr. Sanchez, which would get 30 seats.

Even with the support of Vox, the PP would therefore only have 165 seats, far from an absolute majority, which is 176 seats. On the other hand, the left bloc, with potentially 157 seats, seemed in a paradoxically better position to stay in power thanks to the support of several small Basque and Catalan formations which could bring it the 19 seats it lacks to reach an absolute majority.

Such an outcome would be a huge surprise: all the opinion polls published until Monday – in Spain, their distribution is banned five days before the election – considered a victory for the conservatives almost certain after the rout of the left in the local elections in May. It is moreover this failure which had convinced Mr. Sanchez, in power for five years, to call this early ballot.

An election is “very important for Europe”

The country was feverishly awaiting the results of these legislative elections, also closely scrutinized elsewhere in Europe, because of the possible coming to power of an alliance between the PP and the ultra-conservative Vox party – ultranationalist, Europhobic, rejecting the existence of gender violence, criticizing the “climate fanaticism”anti-LGBT, anti-abortion.

Such a scenario, which now seems very unlikely, would have marked the return to power of the far right in Spain for the first time since the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975, almost half a century ago.

Mr Feijoo said after voting that he hoped Spain “starts a new era”but everything seemed to show on Sunday evening that he would not achieve his goal.

This election is “very important (…) for the world and for Europe”, had estimated, for his part, Mr. Sanchez, who made Vox a scarecrow in order to play on the fear of the far right. denouncing “the tandem formed by the extreme right and the extreme right”he felt that a PP/Vox coalition government “would not only be a setback for Spain” in terms of rights, “but also a serious setback for the European project”.

In a column published on Sunday on The worldthe former British Labor Prime Minister Gordon Brown considered that an entry of Vox into the government – ​​synonymous, according to him, with “Spanish conservatives capitulate to the far right” – “would have repercussions on the whole continent” European.