Polls open in Spanish national elections

MADRID

Voting has begun throughout Spain, where voters have been called to the polls yet again to break the ongoing political deadlock.

These are the third national elections since 2015 and surveys found that around 40 percent of voters had still not made up their mind in the week before elections.

Though results are highly unpredictable, the polls put the incumbent Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez in the lead, closely followed by the conservative Popular Party, the center-right wing party Ciudadanos (Citizens), the far-left party Podemos and then the populist far-right party Vox.

Smaller parties and parties from regions including Catalonia and the Basque Country are also in the running.

While Citizens and Podemos burst onto the national scene in 2015 in response to corruption and frustration with the traditional parties, this is the first year that a far-right party is expected to win significant political representation in Spain’s Parliament since it became a democracy.

The far-right party is skeptical of non-Hispanic immigration to the country, vows to repeal the Gender Violence Act while also giving rapists life imprisonment, and borrows liberally from the rhetoric of other populist politicians such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán and Marine Le Pen.

Vox also claims to take a harder line position on the Catalan separatist movement than Spain’s other political parties. At Vox rallies, a common chant is related to locking up Carles Puigdemont, the Catalan separatist leader who is in self-imposed exile in Belgium.

While polls suggest that Vox had won over the hearts of just 11 percent of the Spanish electorate, depending on how the results come in, the party could be in a position to form or back a right-wing coalition.

Spain’s current PM Pedro Sanchez, who called the snap elections after failing to pass the 2019 budget, hopes, however, that his Socialists will gain more representation in the Parliament and be able to form a left-wing governing coalition.

“A lot is at stake. If we want Spain to look to the future and not go back 40 years with the three parties on the right, we should concentrate our votes in the only party that can stop them: the Socialist Party,” he tweeted on Friday, the last day of the campaign.

Polls close at 8 p.m. (6 p.m. GMT) and results are expected to come in late Sunday night.