Spanish polls missed a last-minute surge in support for Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez in Sunday’s election because they underestimated the impact that fears of a right-wing coalition would have.
(Bloomberg) — Spanish polls missed a last-minute surge in support for Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez in Sunday’s election because they underestimated the impact that fears of a right-wing coalition would have.
Pre-election front-runner Alberto Nunez Feijoo, a conservative, came in well below what most polls projected with only 136 deputies. That left his right-wing bloc short of a majority in parliament and Feijoo’s People’s Party only 14 seats ahead of the Socialists.
With Feijoo looking to form a governing alliance with far-right group Vox, Sanchez spent the final days of the campaign emphasizing the threat that would pose to his administration’s progressive agenda and to relations with Catalonia and the Basque region.
“In the last stretch of the race, the fear of the leftist voter, who stayed home in the last local election, to the fascist threat helps explains this,” said Narciso Michavila, head of GAD3, which had one of the best track records among local pollsters before Sunday. Its survey released after polls closed on Sunday night predicted incorrectly the right-wing parties would have a comfortable majority and the PP would have 150 seats.
A spike in votes for the Socialists, particularly in Catalonia and the Basque country, led to GAD3 overestimating the PP results by around 2 percentage points, Michavila said at an event in Madrid Monday. Separatists in those two regions have been a particular target for Vox, which wants to revoke the widespread powers they enjoy under Spain’s highly devolved system of government.
In Catalonia, the Socialist party won 19 out of 48 seats, its best result in 15 years.
Another post-election survey by Sigma Dos also predicted a much better showing for the PP with a potential majority for the right-wing bloc.
Many Socialist supporters stayed home during May’s local elections and Sanchez galvanized his base by warning that a right-wing government would roll back rights on abortion and euthanasia and cut support for the LGBTQ community. PP-Vox coalitions in dozens of towns and regions have removed rainbow flags from city halls since winning in May and shuttered institutions to promote gender equality.
Despite the swing of support from separatist groups to the Socialists, it’s a pro-independence group Junts per Catalunya that could potentially unlock a third term for Sanchez as he seeks to solve the parliamentary math problem. Still, it’s more likely that Spain will have a repeat election in the coming months.
“We knew that the left was trending higher a week prior to the vote, but polls underestimated that spike,” said Pablo Simon, a politics professor at Carlos III University speaking at the same event as Michavila. “The results show that the two-party system gaining is strength, but instability is far from over.”
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