The right advances in Spain and the Sanchez government weakens. This verdict was given by the regional elections in the metropolitan area of Madrid: a local round, of course, but which nonetheless involved over 5 million eligible voters and was a testing ground for testing both the solidity of the majority in the national Parliament, both the state of play of the Popular Party, the main opposition party, and the growth of the extreme right of Vox. Well the reappointment of outgoing president Isabel Díaz Ayuso, an exponent of the PP who wanted early elections to get rid of his former ally Ciudadanos (mission accomplished: the centrists go from 26 to 0 seats) and obtain an absolute majority on his own (mission almost accomplished), gave all the answers that he could. Meanwhile, it is true that in Madrid the right has been winning for 26 years, but this time it has done it big: the PP has more than doubled its seats, from 30 to 64, and is one step away from the coveted absolute majority set at 69. To get there, the abstention of the Vox populists, who have risen to 13 seats, could be enough, but there is also the hypothesis that the formation of Santiago Abascal will become part of the new regional government.
What is certain is that the left has lost: the seats obtained by the Socialist Party (PSOE), Mas Madrid and Unidas Podemos do not in fact equal those of the PP alone (this is why Ayuso could even manage to govern without the explicit support of Vox). However, if the flop of Podemos was widely announced (it stops at 7,2% and the historic leader Pablo Iglesias announces his retirement from politics), the crash of the PSOE, the party of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, arouses some more concern scores the worst result in its history in the capital, even being surpassed by Mas Madrid, the list headed by Mas Pais, a party born from the split of Podemos and which collected a good 17%, equaling the seats (24) of the socialists. The socialists collected a modest 16,8%, reducing their seats in the regional assembly from 37 to 24 despite the candidacy of Angel Gabilondo, a university professor and former minister with Zapatero, was considered authoritative. The defeat could be a wake-up call given that this was the first major election since Covid and it was also on the management of the pandemic that the game was played, overwhelmingly won by the right.
In fact, even in Spain the duel is between the "rigorist" government left and the more "open-minded" opposition, so much so that there was no lack of head-on clashes between Ayuso and Prime Minister Sanchez, with the former having repeatedly made decisions in contrast with the lines of the national government and the technicians. The outgoing president, and re-elected by popular acclaim, played a good part of the campaign on freedom, on the need not to exaggerate with the restrictions so as not to stop the economy. The result is that in the Madrid region infections and deaths from Covid are on average higher than in other areas of the country: but despite this, and despite the judicial scandals that engulfed the PP just a few years ago, when the premier was still there Rajoy, even in Spain the wind seems to have returned to the right.
