[The Critic] The Stakes in Spain

Their alliance once deemed the obvious and favored alternative to Pedro Sánchez’s far-left ruling coalition, PP and Vox are now falling apart — and endangering that alternative.

As politics goes, the Kingdom of Spain could just as well be called “Kingdom of Spin” — denoting the ability of events to whirl around at dizzying speed. In the two months since May’s local-cum-regional races and leading up to Sunday’s general showdown, the country’s political epicenter — the voting bloc whose swing will decide the new government in the autumn — has been shifting at break-neck pace. Following his party’s severe beating across several former fiefdoms in May, incumbent socialist PM Pedro Sánchez forsook the four remaining months of his mandate by calling Sunday’s snap election. In doing so, he also truncated, in the likely scenario of a power switch, Spain’s once-every-ten-years turn at holding the rotating presidency of the EU Council in the year’s latter semester, which began in June (though other member states have switched governments mid-presidency in the past and their priorities tend to be harmonized across trios anyway, those Sánchez’s team would have pursued will likely differ significantly from those of his successor).

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