Spain began voting in an early general election on Sunday, with the conservative Popular Party (PP) expected to defeat Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialists but likely requiring the far-right to govern.
PP leader Alberto Nunez Feijoo said he believed Spain can start a new era after casting his ballot in Madrid.
Final opinion polls allowed under Spanish law and published predicted the PP would win the most seats in the 350-seat parliament but fall short of a workable parliamentary majority.
That could force the PP to form a coalition with Vox, giving a far-right party a share of power at the national level for the first time since the end of the decades-long dictatorship of General Francisco Franco in 1975.
Vox is part of a Europe-wide trend of far-right parties gaining support at the ballot box, with such formations already governing alone or in coalition with the centre-right in Hungary, Italy and Finland.
Sanchez, who has been in office since 2018, warned Feijoo during a heated TV debate that a PP-Vox coalition administration would “take us into a dark time warp that will leave us who knows where.”
Vox pledges in its political platform to repeal laws against gender violence, LGBTQ rights, abortion, and euthanasia, as well as to outlaw separatist parties and safeguard traditions such Spanish bullfighting.
Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called Vox’s agenda “chilling” in an opinion article published Sunday in French daily Le Monde, warning its entry into government in Spain “would push Europe one step further into a right-wing abyss.”
This is the first national election in Spain’s modern history to be held at the height of summer, when many people are on holidays.
Turnout as of 2:00 pm (1200 GMT) stood at 40.5 percent, up from 37.9 percent at the same tine during the last general election in 2019.
The figure does not include the record 2.47 million registered voters who cast an absentee ballot.
