By Inés Fernández-Pontes
Key Takeaways:
- Pedro Sánchez said Monday he will dissolve parliament after an emergency cabinet and a notice to King Felipe VI, and call a general election for Nov. 29, well before the summer 2027 deadline, after eight years in office.
- The trigger was Friday’s defeat of two housing decrees, including eviction curbs, after the removal of an 87-year-old woman in Madrid; Junts voted with the People’s Party and Vox.
- El País said he spent the weekend testing a housing-and-social-rights campaign to crowd out Ceuta and corruption; polls cited in the piece have the right potentially ahead, and no result is decided.
(EurActiv) — Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, announced snap elections on Monday as his turbulent second term comes to a close.
In an official address, Sánchez said he would convene an emergency cabinet meeting, inform King Felipe VI of the dissolution of Parliament, and call a general election for November 29.
“The time has come for the Spanish people to decide what future they want,” Sánchez said.
Sánchez had until the summer of 2027 to call an election, and until now it was unclear what date the embattled Socialist leader would choose. Now, after eight years in power, the prime minister is kicking off his re-election campaign months early, outlining his social and economic agenda.
“There are still many injustices to be rectified – to achieve more, we need greater and renewed support from the people – we must ensure that the parliament grants us a larger majority, so that we can bring the elites to heel,” he said.
His highly-anticipated announcement follows a weekend in which the Spanish premier had reportedly been in constant phone contact with members of the government, the Socialist Party (PSOE), and his “inner circle,” according to the newspaper El País, as he weighed the benefits of a potential snap election before the end of the year.
The catalyst was the defeat of two fast-tracked housing decrees in Congress on Friday. Sánchez’s Socialist-led coalition had put forward the bills as a response to growing social unrest following the eviction of an 87-year-old woman from her apartment in Madrid.
The housing crisis has overshadowed the mishandling of the Ceuta crisis, in which tens of thousands of Moroccans crossed into the Spanish exclave in July, as well as high-profile corruption scandals plaguing the government and the PSOE.
Local media noted that, over the past days, both the government and the PSOE saw a “favourable window” to launch a campaign and rally the left, focusing on housing and social rights, and contrasting themselves with the conservative bloc led by the Partido Popular, Vox, and Junts, a Catalan pro-independence party and former Sánchez ally, which voted against the decrees.
According to polls, with the right potentially set to win the next general election, Sánchez’s bet on a snap election is to overshadow the high-profile corruption scandals and crises of his eight years in office and to avert a crushing defeat for the PSOE.
