MADRID (Reuters) – Spanish opposition leader Alberto Nunez Feijoo, leader of the conservative People’s Party (PP), won an ill-tempered televised debate on Monday night ahead of an election later this month, a poll published by El Mundo newspaper indicated on Tuesday.
With Feijoo leading in polls before the July 23 election, the onus was on Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, a Socialist, to go on the attack. While he defended his government’s economic record, he failed to land any significant blows.
About 54% of voters thought Feijoo won the debate compared to 46% for Sanchez, according to the Sigma Dos survey for El Mundo.
It found that 22% of people who voted for the Socialists in the past election felt Feijoo had won the debate while only 6% of PP voters assigned the victory to Sanchez.
Other media outlets appeared to agree.
“Sanchez was weighed down by his need to win,” Josep Marti Blanch wrote in La Vanguardia. “He entered every corner in one gear too high and that’s why he ended up crashing into himself.”
With the prospect that neither of the two main parties will secure an outright majority, the election is developing as an ideological tussle between those opposed to a possible PP-led government that could include the far-right Vox and those who oppose the current Socialist-led coalition that includes the far left.
Opinion polls predict Feijoo as the likely winner in the election but if he brings Vox into a coalition, this would see a far-right party in government for the first time since the end of dictatorship and Spain’s return to democracy in the 1970s.
It would also add to a right-wing trend across Europe, most notably in Italy.
In the debate, Sanchez sought to attack Feijoo for the potential alliance with Vox, but Feijoo responded by proposing a deal to the Socialists to allow the winner of the election to govern in a minority in order to avoid having to make pacts with the far right or left and regional pro-independence parties.
A combined PP and Vox would win 180 seats, four more than the minimum needed for a working majority in parliament, according to a poll by GAD3 for ABC on Monday night. The Socialists and the far-left platform Sumar would win 140 seats, it showed.
Sanchez, in power since 2019, called the surprise snap election on May 29 after his leftist coalition was routed in regional and municipal ballots.
Less than six million people watched the debate which was broadcast simultaneously on the right-wing Antena 3 and left-wing laSexta, both owned by Atresmedia. Those were the lowest viewing figures for an electoral debate in Spain on record, according to analysis by Barlovento Comunicacion.
The expectation is that the election at the height of the summer holiday season will also suffer from a lack of engagement.
(Reporting by Charlie Devereux, editing by Andrei Khalip and Angus MacSwan)
