Six months before parliamentary elections, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist Party suffered an extremely heavy defeat in Spain’s municipal and regional elections on Sunday, a result that bodes ill for his hold on power at the end of the year.

The leader of the People’s Party (PP), the main right-wing opposition, Alberto Núñez Feijo, immediately spoke of a “new political cycle”.

The PP yesterday took a “giant step” on the path that is expected to take Mr. Feijo to the prime minister’s post at the end of 2023, said the head of the Andalusian government, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, a leader of the Spanish right.

Apart from the PP, the other big gainer is the far-right party Vox, already the third force in parliament, which with over 1.5 million votes in the municipal elections (7.19%), doubled its percentage in four years making a spectacular entrance in several local parliaments.

Opinion polls predicted a right-wing victory in yesterday’s double election, but no one expected Spain’s Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) to suffer such losses.

“Tsunami”

The head of the outgoing government in Cantabria (north), Miguel Ángel Revilla, leader of a local faction allied with the Socialists, spoke of a “flood of the right”, both PP and Vox, while the head of the PSOE government in Aragon, referred to a “tsunami” that swallowed the “wall” of the Socialists.

Both were defeated.

“The result was not what we hoped for,” summed up PSOE spokeswoman Pilar Alegría, visibly upset.

The PP, which turned the local and regional elections into a national referendum on Mr. Sanchez’s policies, practically achieved all the goals it had set.

Above all, it garnered the highest number of votes in municipal elections, over 7 million (31.5%), or two million more than four years ago, compared to less than 6.3 million (28 .1%) received by Mr Sanchez’s PSOE.

Thus, according to the Spanish public television network TVE and the newspaper El País, the PP won at least six out of ten of the regions where until yesterday the PSOE governed (alone or thanks to alliances): Valencia (east), fourth in population throughout the country, Aragon (central), Extremadura (west), Balearics (east), Cantabria and Rioja (north).

However, the other side of the coin is that in most of these districts, he will need the support of Vox to govern, and the far-right party is announced to be a difficult and difficult partner for the PP, which wants to project a moderate image.

These two factions have already been ruling a district together since last year.

The Socialist Party was defeated by the PP in the municipality of Seville, the largest city in Andalusia (southern) and its traditional stronghold, as it was in Valencia. And it is not certain that he will win in Barcelona either, where his candidate only took second place, behind a separatist.

Absolute majority in Madrid

Yesterday’s elections concerned all 8,131 municipalities, in other words 35.5 million voters, as well as the parliaments of 12 of the 17 “autonomies” (regions) of the country. This second aspect of the election involved 18.3 million voters.

And it is precisely this second vote that was considered a general rehearsal of the parliamentary elections, the date of which is not yet known.

Neither Mr. Sanchez nor Mr. Feijo was a candidate in yesterday’s elections.

But the stake was very important for the two politicians, who were actively involved in the pre-election campaign, to the extent that analysts described this showdown as a wind indicator ahead of the parliamentary elections.

Mr Sanchez campaigned on his government’s record, mainly on the economy. Mr Feijo also threw himself wholeheartedly into the electoral battle, his first since taking over as PP leader.

The People’s Party not only retained the two regions where it ruled (Madrid and Murcia), but it captured an absolute majority in both. As in the municipality of the capital.