Spain braces for results of contentious snap election
By Pamela Rolfe and James McAuley James McAuley Foreign correspondent focusing on French and European politics and culture Email Bio Follow April 28 at 5:20 PM MADRID — Spain’s Socialist party stood poised to win the lion’s share of votes in a contentious snap election Sunday that will determine the future of the country’s legislature in a moment of bitter political polarization.
The vote marked the third time Spaniards have gone to the polls in less than four years, and the results are likely to further divide a two-party political culture that has traded power since the country’s post-Franco transition to democracy in the late 1970s. Voters chose between five parties. For the first time since Spain’s democratic transition, a far-right faction, known as Vox, is expected to enter parliament.
As has been the case elsewhere in Europe, the emergence of a right-wing fringe faction has pushed Spain’s traditional, mainstream right-wing parties farther to the right. Santiago Abascal, the leader of Vox, has taunted the typically center-right Popular Party as the “cowardly little right.” The PP’s leader, Pablo Casado, seems determined to prove Abascal wrong, pursuing an anti-Catalan, anti-immigrant hard-line that none of his predecessors pursued.
Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias of the far-left, anti-austerity Podemos party insisted on the need for further dialogue to resolve the Catalan situation. The prime minister then refused to discuss what he called “preventive pardons” and insisted there would be “no referendum nor independence” in Catalonia and invited the separatists to “return to the framework of the statute and the constitution.”
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