Spain’s Election Gives a Lift to the Left and a Warning to the Far Right

Spaniards are not only wise but also génerous. They like share wellness with family and poor people. Their public educación and health sistem are excelente. It is one of the Seafest countries in the world and with the higer life expectance. The Ford is also good. In these elections far-left and socialistas had the samm program except for the desired catalonian referéndum. But referéndum are dangerous, look at the brexit

What killed Vox is that their main platform flies in the face of the Puigdemontesque Catalan-right. If they respected regional autonomy, this election would have gone very differently.

Spain has a savvy electorate. After the Partido Popular Prime Minister José Aznar backed Bush’s war in Iraq which was opposed by most Spaniards, there was a horrible bombing on the trains in Madrid. Days before an election, Aznar tried to blame Basque terrorists. The Spaniards knew that was a lie and they ousted Jose Aznar. We will learn in 2020 if Americans will tolerate 10,000+ lies.

Socialist gains in Spain is good news for the EU? Is this a Freudian slip.

So sad to hear references from almost 50 years ago. Past has gone and fortunatelly will never be back.

The saddest thing is leftist win is just because electoral system (hondt law) punish the parties dispersion. The fact is spanish left (PSOE socialist podemos) and spanish (far) right (PP, Cs and VOX) have both had a little more than 11 milions votes. USA know very well as popular vote is not the same that representation. In the next election (Europeans) with lower turn-out and perfect proportional system you will publish the far right astonishing win with the very same number of votes they have had this time.

Pedro Sanchez was given a gift in the form of Vox. It was a perfect foil to animate his supporters, the undecideds, the unmotivated and the moderate middle. Vox did poorly in peripheral regions and among historic nationalities (Euskadi, Galicia, Cataluña, Canary Islands) where the turnout was higher. The presence of Vox meant the right fragmented and cannibalized votes from the formerly hegemonic PP. Ciudadanos and Vox showed marked increases in votes and representatives but at the expense of the PP. The socialists ended up winning representatives from the rural heartland that would not have been possible w/o three parties on the right. Total votes between the two national blocks was roughly equal but the difference in results was from the efficiency of the PSOE's vote distribution. Vox was crucial to the socialist victory.

You give the impression that the Left won, but with 2.7 million votes (10.3%) and 24 members in the Spanish parliament, Vox is the real winner of yesterday’s election. Santiago Abascal is the Spanish Matteo Salvini. You might remember that Italy’s Lega was at barely 4% a few years ago, but Mr. Salvini has brought it to a resounding 37% at the moment. Mr. Abascal will do the same for Spain.

Congratulations to the voters of Spain! They set an admirable example with their turnout of 76 percent. More importantly social democracy continues to succeed with Spain's plebiscite. The good news is that the voters did not give in to extremism over what's clearly a popular movement in Catalonia. It would be useful to know how the Catalans voted tho given the overall numbers.

Vox is Old Spain's imperialist past re-emerging. The suggestion that the Autonomous Regions be abolished is Madrid centralist imperialist right-wing. The Catalan separatists are fired up about having Catalonia colonized by Spaniards during the Franco years so that they became a minority in their own region with its distinct language and history which has been saved by Autonomy and the policy that all public school education be in Catalan with 2-3 hours a week in Spanish - fear of cultural extinction (as what happened in southern France where everyone spoke Occitan/Provencal 100 years ago and French as a second language) fuels Catalan resistance and secessionism to Madrid PP, Ciudadanos and Vox Spanish Nationalism.

An informative article that provides some useful context. But like so much coverage of elections in the NYT, it doesn't provide a clear breakdown of the percentage of the vote (and seats) won by the major contenders. And sometimes it provides no such information at all, e.g. how did the Catalan parties do? What about Podemos? Both are indicated as potential allies of the Socialists (and it takes a dozen paragraphs to learn how many seats they won, though not with what percent of the vote). In short, the NYT can do better – this obviously applies to its general coverage of voting results. Trust your readers, we can handle numbers!

The election no doubt was a victory for the Socialists and, in general, for Spain´s progressives. But we should not lose sight of the fact that the two large political and ideological blocs came out even in the vote, each with 43%. Raphael Minder has very ably explained the political reasons for the Socialist victory, but he barely alluded to the all-important technical reasons. Spain´s electoral law gives somewhat greater value to rural votes rather than urban ones and, especially in rural areas, in this case the so-called España vacía or empty Spain, it favors large unified parties over smaller, fragmented tendencies. In the end, that, along with the massive mobilization of progessive voters, won the day.