Spain’s national vote tests rising power of the hard right

In Spain this past week, rising temperatures have been grabbing the headlines, and not just as a matter of meteorology.

Spain’s political temperature has been rising, too, ahead of a national election on Sunday that has implications for other divided and disaffected European democracies.

That’s because the Spanish election isn’t just about specific policy choices.

It could end up rupturing a political consensus that has buttressed Spain’s democracy since decades of dictatorship ended in 1977 by giving an extreme-right party a place in national government for the first time since General Francisco Franco’s rule.

And the rising fortunes of Spain’s small extreme right-wing Vox party – positioning it to win seats in a coalition government if the main center-right party outpolls the incumbent social democrats on Sunday – reflect a deeper shift in democracies elsewhere in Europe and worldwide.

It is grounded in the fading appeal of mainstream center-left and center-right political parties in the face of once-fringe politicians who use hot-button economic and social issues to tap into disenchantment with the leaders, institutions, and shared values that have long underpinned Western democracies.

That doesn’t mean Spain is about to pivot back to dictatorship. But the bitterly fought election has underscored how dramatically the rules of political engagement have been changing in 21st-century democracies. And it has highlighted the challenge facing those determined to turn back the tide of far-right populism.

That is the task that Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has set himself on Sunday.

He called the election five months earlier than expected, in the wake of a disastrous showing by his social-democratic PSOE in May local elections. The party lost some 1,500 councilors, while the center-right People’s Party gained 3,000, and Vox more than 1,000.

The PP reached power-sharing deals with Vox in a number of towns and cities. Mr. Sanchez is hoping to galvanize voter opposition to the prospect that Vox will take a similar back-door route into national government.

He also has a good economic story to tell. Spain’s economy grew by more than 4% in the first quarter of this year. Inflation is 2%, far lower than in many other European countries.

Still, the result remains hard to predict, not least because the debilitating heat wave could drive down turnout.

And Mr. Sanchez is far from assured of victory.

Neither his party nor the PP will win a parliamentary majority. But as opinion polls now stand, the center-right party is projected to win a narrow victory, and Vox will win the seats the PP would need to form a coalition government.

How big a shift?

How dramatically Spain might shift politically would depend on the degree to which the PP moved to accommodate Vox’s strident rejection of current policies on issues such as immigration, climate change, and LGBTQ+ rights.

But simply giving Vox a voice in government would break a long-standing taboo – against giving far-right groups a share of power  –among the center-right and center-left parties that have long dominated European politics. It would not be the first time. Elsewhere in Europe, far-right leaders are appealing successfully to voters’ economic insecurity, assertive nationalism, and resentment of immigrants and other minority groups.

That was a winning ticket last year for Giorgia Meloni, the far-right prime minister of Italy. And in both Sweden and Finland, center-right parties have recently done deals with extreme-right nationalist leaders so as to be able to form governments.

This month, the center-right prime minister of The Netherlands, Mark Rutte, resigned after his coalition partners balked at the toughened immigration policy that he had hoped would deflect pressure from the extremist Freedom Party.

Ms. Meloni has made no secret of her hope of seeing Vox join Spain’s next government, foreseeing an “hour of the patriots” in which the far-right agenda will gain sway within the 27-nation European Union.

She’ll be aware that, whatever the result of Spain’s election, any such shift will face headwinds from other EU countries determined to fend off any such rightward drift.

Yet the sort of scenario that the far-right inroads could ultimately lead to is on show in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu managed to assemble a parliamentary majority last year only by co-opting small far-right parties that mainstream politicians had previously shunned. They have prodded him into trying to gut the oversight role of Israel’s Supreme Court, seen as a bastion of liberalism.

But that effort has sparked months of street demonstrations by people young and old, on the left and the right, who say they are defending Israel’s democracy.

That is the kind of movement that Mr. Sanchez is trying to stir by calling the snap election. His future – and perhaps Spain’s – depends on whether he can revive enthusiastic grassroots support for the more centrist, inclusive kind of democracy that in Spain, and elsewhere in Europe, is increasingly under populist challenge.