SPAIN went to the polls on Sunday May 28 to elect 8,100 city and town hall representatives including in the cities of Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia; 12 autonomous communities which have legislative responsibilities over education, housing and health were also re-elected.

With the conservative and reactionary right on the rise over the past year, the Spanish left, which is currently in a coalition government nationally, had hoped to save certain strategic terrain. For the radical left, its aim was to enter or maintain some representation in big cities. Both the centre-left and radical left failed to do both.

The right has been on the attack for some time, weaving a narrative of an illegitimate government and using lawfare where possible. This started during the Covid-19 lockdown and was solidified by a rise in the polls for the People’s Party (PP).

While trying to portray itself as “moderate,” it had used the renewal of the judicial council as a ransom against the government to make it look like it does not have control over all the organs of the state — which to a degree is true.

The PP and Vox (a far-right split from the PP) have relied on right-wing judges in the judiciary to make the government look unstable, something they have learnt front their far-right counterparts in Latin America.

More recently, during the campaign period, Isabel Ayuso, president of the Madrid community, from the more Trumpian wing of the PP, has been trying to use the government’s confidence and supply agreements with Basque party EH Bildu and the Left Catalan Republican party to portray the government as anti-Spanish.

The armed Basque separatist group ETA may have dissolved, but for the Spanish right, it hasn’t. This nationalist “traitor” rhetoric originally comes from the far-right party Vox but has been picked up and legitimised by the centre-right and the media.

The PP had hoped that economic trouble would help its claim to the government, but the coalition has dealt with numerous crises well, including an increase in the national minimum wage, a successful furlough scheme during the pandemic and a repeal of the PP’s previous labour legislation which resulted in less temporary contracts and more rights for workers.

Spain has one of the lowest levels of inflation in Europe and it has the lowest energy prices on the continent too, hence why the right-wing block has resorted to lawfare, toxic nationalism and bringing up ghosts of the past.

Fighting chronic precarious contracts and low pay has made Deputy Prime Minister and Labour Minister Yolanda Diaz, the country’s most prominent Communist Party of Spain (PCE) politician and one of the most popular and competent politicians in the country, even more popular than Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.

With this popularity and the unexpected departure of Podemos founder Pablo Iglesias back in 2021, Diaz has led in setting up the new platform Sumar, which like Unidas Podemos includes the Izquierda Unida (United Left) alliance in which the Communist Party is the leading force. This platform was set up to broaden the space to the left of the PSOE and re-engage the people who had once been part of the Podemos project or voted for them when they first started.

Modelled on similar political structures like Francois Melenchon’s La France Insoumise in France and the coalition built by Gabriel Boric in Chile, Diaz aspires to be Prime Minister of Spain by making civil society the protagonist rather than the numerous left-wing formations.

Taking a look at the vote share from Sunday’s local elections, while the left may have lost many seats, the vote share for the PSOE has only dropped by around 1 per cent.

Back in 2019 many of the regional and local governments were coalitions stitched up between various left-wing parties such as Unidas Podemos and the PSOE. Their loss is down to the fall in the vote on the radical left which has fallen due to prolonged infighting between Podemos and Sumar. It gave the campaign a bad start before it had even started.

Podemos was fighting to maintain its independence and hegemonic status on the left, wanting to be in a coalition with Sumar and not just another party that sits within it. Attacks on Diaz were being made by Iglesias from his podcast La Base, despite him not having a position in Podemos anymore.

However, after Sunday’s bad results, Podemos has seen its claim to being the main force on the left diminished as it failed to enter both Valencia and Madrid regional parliaments and city halls. Ada Colou’s loss in Barcelona has also been a knock to the radical left.

With the fall in the radical left vote, many of the previous coalition arrangements in various city halls and regional parliaments with the PSOE will not be renewed. The PP also benefited from the slowly dying, supposedly “liberal” party Ciudadanos.

With this it was able to come top in many elections, but in the majority of cases it will struggle to form administrations without Vox, something it had been hoping to avoid.

Seeing this, Prime Minister Sanchez called a general election on Monday morning after the local elections. Seeing that PSOE’s vote share had held and that those to its left were disorganised and bleeding out, Sanchez took the opportunity to dissolve parliament to call elections for July 23.

There has also been internal pressure within his own party, as many of the big figures that hold positions of power do not like the fact that the government is reliant on the radical left and the separatist parties.

Furthermore, Sanchez will also be able to point at the PP forming administrations with Vox, thus putting the PP’s image as moderates into question.

By forcing an election, Sanchez hopes to regain enough power to govern without being so reliant on other parties. With the threat of a PP-Vox coalition, he has already started positioning his party as the sensible vote — the only left-wing party big enough to stop a far-right government.

If this is enough to mobilise the left-wing vote remains to be seen. One thing it will do is focus the minds of Podemos and Sumar to make them come to an agreement. They had 10 days to negotiate and register their decision from the day that elections were called. If they go separately, then the renewal of the current coalition government is greatly diminished.