“Sánchez has played a high game”

Political scientist Niklas Bremberg is not surprised that the right side won the Spanish election.

It does, however, the high game, to paint the right as the great threat to the country, which Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has played in recent weeks.

The right-wing side appears to be heading for victory in the Spanish parliamentary elections, which is due to a mobilization among the voters and a dissatisfaction with the incumbent government’s rule. Niklas Bremberg, docent in political science at Stockholm University, believes so.

But both the governing party PSOE and the left-wing alliance Sumar have succeeded better than it first looked like they would and that is surprising, he says.

– They may not be the biggest, but they have possibly deprived PP and Vox of an opportunity to get their own majority in parliament.

High-profile politicians

In the final weeks of the election run-up, PSOE leader and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez painted the PP and Vox as a threat and that they would constitute the most right-wing government since the Franco era.

– He has played a high game, faithful to his habit. After all, he did it when he managed to get the vote of no confidence out in 2018 and then when he managed to stitch together a coalition with the left in 2019 and when he managed to recapture the party leadership post. He is a politician who played high and it has benefited him, let’s see if it does now.

Tough negotiations await

Regardless of which party becomes the largest and which block takes home the mandates, Niklas Bremberg believes that tough government negotiations await, because even if PP and Vox already govern together in several localities today, the parties are relatively different.

– PP has to deal with Vox, that is the big thing. I think we need to know how strong PP is to see whose strategy they choose. But PP will have a hard time putting together another government and it would be the most right-wing government we would have seen in that case. Some kind of taboo would be broken if Vox were to gain influence over politics, but it depends on how much and what influence they get.

For the PSOE and the left-wing alliance Sumar, where several of the parties were part of the current government, the starting point is fundamentally better, but not completely straightforward either, Niklas Bremberg believes.

– Of course there have been squeals in the government coalition, but they still have a personal chemistry and an experience of governing together. But having said that, it is quite complex to stitch together the government documents.

May affect the EU in the long run

At the beginning of July, Spain took over the presidency of the EU, but Bremberg does not believe that the change of government in the country would have time to be felt during the six months that Spain holds the club.

– It may take a little while before the government is in place, but if there is a PP government, they will try to protect Spanish EU policy from Vox during the presidency, he believes, adding that many of the issues that will be pursued during the Spanish presidency have already been set in motion at civil servant level.

– With a Spanish right-wing government and an EU parliamentary election next year, the Spanish government will pursue issues with other right-wing governments in the union and it will probably be felt.