Madrid: Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist Party emerged as the single largest political party after it won 123 seats in the Sunday’s snap election, official results showed.
However, PM Sanchez will need the support of at least one other party to stay in power. The Socialist Party (PSOE) obtained 28.69% of the vote, and 123 of the 350 lower-house seats, according to official results with 99.65% of the votes counted, Efe news reported on Sunday.
The conservative Popular Party (PP) came second, with 16.69% and 66 seats, followed by Ciudadanos (Citizens, centre-right) with 15.85%, garnering 57 seats, and leftist Unidas Podemos (United We Can) getting 35 seats with 11.95% votes.
Vox — the first far-right party to enter the National Parliament since Spain’s transition to democracy after Francisco Franco’s death in 1975 — obtained 10.26% of the votes and 24 seats.
The leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, was the first party leader to appear before his supporters, who welcomed him on Madrid’s Margaret Thatcher Square with shouts of “Spain, united, will never be defeated!” Vox has a heavy emphasis on anti-Catalan separatism, one of the central pillars of a party whose meteoric rise came after the illegal referendum in the prosperous northeastern Catalonia in 2017.
