Spain reels as Vox storms into Andalusia

Bloomberg

Spain’s political establishment suffered another significant crack on Sunday as the far-right group Vox won its first ever representation in a regional election in Andalusia, carving off voters who were targeted by the center-right People’s Party.
Vox won 12 seats in the 109-seat regional assembly, a stronghold for Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialists for the past 36 years. The Socialists’ grip on Andalusia was hanging by a thread after slumping to 33 seats from 47 in 2015. The PP dropped to 26 seats from 33 last time around.
Three years after a watershed election ended the two-party system that has steered Spain since the return to democracy in 1978, the political landscape is getting even more tangled.
One constant in Spanish politics over the four decades since the end of the dictatorship has been the ability of the PP and its predecessors to prevent the emergence of a rival on its right. That run is now over, posing an unprecedented challenge to the party as it looks towards possible national elections in 2019 under an untested leader in 37-year-old Pablo Casado.
Vox policies include calling for the immediate suspension of self-government in Catalonia, closing the Senate, controlling immigration and slashing taxes. Its leaders have met with Donald Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon.
The result in Andalusia won praise from French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who is looking to form loose alliance for next year’s European elections with figures such as Italian Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini and Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister.
“The first impression is the size of the defeat for the Socialists,” said Antonio Barroso, a political risk analyst at advisory firm Teneo Intelligence. “Even so, it may provide them with a rallying cry and I am sure they will try to use that.”
But if the Andalusian vote dealt a blow to the Socialists, it also presents a challenge for the PP, even if ironically the result may hand them the keys to power in the region, said Barroso. “It’s a very bad result for the PP in terms of numbers,” he said.