Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist Party on Sunday lost more than a quarter of its seats in regional elections, which right-wing parties carried handily.
ACOM, a prominent pro-Israel nongovernmental organization in Spain, welcomed the result as a sign of weakness for a government that has led efforts to isolate and punish the Jewish state within the European Union and beyond.
Angel Mas, ACOM’s president, told JNS that the result likely reflects a broader discontent with the Socialists nationally. It may mean a shift to the right in the next elections, he added, but only if the conservative bloc unites enough to govern together.
The Socialists clinched 18 out of the regional parliament’s 65 seats. Their share was 28 seats in the 2023 elections. The share of the incumbent, center-right Popular Party remained steady. The right-wing Vox party more than doubled its seats, to 11.
Sanchez’s party is currently facing several corruption scandals, including one involving last month’s arrest of one of his predecessors, Jose Luis Abalos, allegedly for taking bribes. Sanchez’s wife and younger brother are also facing graft allegations.
Critics of the Sanchez government, including ACOM, have alleged that its hostility toward Israel is meant to divert attention from its scandals. This critique was the premise of a satirical sketch featured in October on a local counterpart of “Saturday Night Live” (“Polònia,” aired by the Catalonian public broadcaster TV3.)
Spain was the first E.U. member state to intervene against Israel in the trial for genocide that South Africa initiated in 2023. In May, Sanchez called Israel a “genocidal state.” Last year, the de facto leader of a coalition partner of the Socialists, Labor Minister Yolanda Díaz, ended a televised address with the slogan: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
The Popular Party has been friendlier to Israel than the Socialists, but it is split on the issue, according to Mas. The incumbent president of Extremadura, Popular Party member María Guardiola, said in a speech in September that she must “speak out against the barbarity and horror being experienced in Gaza.”
Israel was not a key issue in the Extremadura regional elections, which revolve around issues such as control of policy on education, healthcare, infrastructure and culture.
Guardiola “represents that wing of the Popular Party that is not particularly pro-Israel,” Mas said, adding that group has “embraced” the left’s anti-Israel rhetoric. The Popular Party also has staunchly pro-Israel leaders such as Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the autonomous Community of Madrid. Earlier this year, during a speech at Auschwitz-Birkenau, she said: “If Israel is not safe, none of us will be.”
To govern, Mas said, the Popular Party will likely need to come to agreements with Vox, a more conservative movement that is staunchly pro-Israel, opposes immigration and is more skeptical of the European Union than the leadership of the Poplar Party.
The two parties came to understandings in 2023 in Extremadura, where their combined tally of seats in the regional parliament on Sunday rose by seven, to 40 out 65 seats. Yet nationally, “a coalition government between the two is far from a given outcome,” said Mas.
The regions of Andalusia, Aragon and Castile and Leon are scheduled to hold elections during the first half of 2026.
