Elections 2023: Spain and Cambodia
In Spain a deeply fractured government leaves the left in charge—sort of….In Cambodia, autocrat Hun Sen, one-time Khmer Rouge officer, is re-upped as Asia’s longest-reigning leader. No surprise.
Continuing our pledge at Andelman Unleashed to report and comment on every national election everywhere in the world, voters in Spain went to the polls in a snap election that may help shape Europe’s agenda as well, while Cambodians had little choice at all. Reporting today from Paris.
A new reign in Spain
Spain appears to have rejoined the ranks of those floundering European nations struggling to find a leader, let alone a stable, highly functioning government. On Sunday, Spanish voters couldn’t quite bring themselves either to give the reigning Socialists a firm new lease on life or welcome the heirs of far-right dictator Francisco Franco back into a position of even helping to rule their nation. So, while the center right People’s Party (PP) surged into the lead, gaining 61 seats in the parliament, they failed to win the absolute majority they needed to form a government with Vox, the party of the hard-right.
As a result, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, leading the Socialist Party (PSOE) ticket—who’d rolled the dice calling for an early snap election in the middle of the summer and a brutal heat wave—will remain in office, potentially for a very long time as Spain now grapples with the kind of parliamentary gridlock that first brought him to power eight years ago. As Spain’s leading daily El Pais put it Monday morning: “The seven lives of Pedro Sánchez.” All the confetti in the world still found center-right PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo at least somewhat out in the cold.
The final vote of 136 (PP) to 132 (PSOE), even combined respectively with Vox’s 33 and 31 for far-left Sumar (SUM) boosted neither side of the political spectrum to a majority of 176.
As it happens, in the Senate, which plays no role in the formation of a ruling government, the PP actually managed an absolute majority of 120 to 72.
In effect, this was a very similar scenario to the first time Sánchez took office in 2015 when his PSOE also managed a dismal second place in Congress with 90 votes to the PP’s 123—each far short of a 176-vote majority. Then, King Felipe VI asked Sanchez to cobble together a government with a host of small, regional left-leaning parties. Vox was nowhere at that time.
On Sunday, Spanish voters managed to avoid following a broad trend lately in western Europe—a sharp turn to the right, as Andelman Unleashed has been chronicling for nearly two years. Many progressives have feared such a trend, particularly if ratified in the continent’s fourth largest nation, could culminate in a right-turn next June when voters across the continent elect a new European Parliament. Indeed, the stakes are high. Many of these right-wing parties are less than fully supportive of Ukraine, though PP has pledged its support. But most of Europe’s right want a much smaller and less intrusive EU bureaucracy across the board.
In Spain, the tilt was only moderately to the right—the PP picking up 47 votes, the Socialists adding just two—but in any case not a sharp enough turn to starboard to avoid potential chaos.
“Nobody could believe it in the PP,” wrote Elsa Garcia de Blas in El Pais. “As the counting progressed, the mood darkened. ‘Up to 60% is not worrisome. From there things get ugly,’ pointed out a party leader when the first signs began that the night was not looking good. Nothing was as expected. The party had come to terms with the idea of a comfortable victory and a guaranteed majority with Vox, as all their internal tracking told them throughout the campaign, but as the counting evolved, the idea began to dissipate. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who only a week before the elections maintained in private that he saw an absolute majority of the PP as possible, suddenly saw how his expectations vanished.”
Defining Spain’s direction?
Just why did Sánchez call the snap election now? A national parliamentary vote was mandated before the end of this year, when he would be wrapping up his four-year term as the nation’s first-ever coalition leader. But on May 28 his party suffered catastrophic defeats in regional and municipal contests. “These results suggest Spaniards should clarify which political forces they want to take the lead,” Sánchez said, observing the people needed to “take the floor and define the country’s political direction.” He appeared to have been hoping that the failure of the center and right to accumulate outright majorities in the local contests might open a narrow path for a national victory for his center-left coalition.
And then there was the hope that the sharp upward direction in the nation’s economy might provide a national momentum that would overwhelm any appeal of the conservative parties. Last year growth surged 5.5% and while that figure is expected to be trimmed this year and next, it still remains positive and ahead of much of the rest of Europe, which is struggling. Equally, inflation has been more than halved to 4% from 8.3% last year and is expected to plunge again next year to 2.7%, though unemployment remains stubbornly above 12%.
Clearly, a strong overall economy carried more weight with voters than PP had believed. And indeed, despite the near-100-degree heat and the vacation season, voters turned out in droves—70.40% of eligible voters cast ballots, compared to 66.23% in the last election in 2019.
In the final days of the campaign, there was already some suggestions of trouble for the PP. Feijoo stumbled over the issue of pension levels and saw a resurgence of troubling questions about his ties with a now-convicted drug dealer in the 1990s. He also cast doubt on the impartiality of postal workers “to deliver all the votes.” Sound familiar? This had become a crucial question in Spain since mail-in balloting swelled three-fold to 2.6 million from under a million in 2019, in large part by the timing in the heart of vacation season and in the midst of 90-plus degree heatwave.
Indeed, the right had already begun showing its colors in the wake of municipal elections in May. One of the first acts by the new Vox mayor of Náquera was to order the removal of all Pride flags from municipal buildings—though he couldn’t do the same for private residences, while the hatred Vox has exhibited toward the nation’s “Equality Ministry” did not bode well for its membership in any coalition that might have included now largely repudiated Vox leader Santiago Abascal.
Spanish voters still have long and bitter memories of the 36 years of dictatorial rule by Franco and the Spanish Civil War that ushered him in to power and his alliance with Hitler.
Still, Valencia, third largest city in Spain, was thought to be an important test case. There, Sanchez’s Socialists took a particular drubbing in May’s municipal balloting and, though the PP surged to a plurality, it still needed Vox votes to form a government. That left the path open to the renowned bullfighter and local Vox leader Vicente Barrera Simo to take over as the region’s vice president, with the powerful justice, interior and justice ministries in Vox’s hands as well.
The path also appeared open to a host of other Vox priorities—repeal of the regional law of historical memory of 2017 that condemned Francoism; stop the exhumation of some 600 mass graves and reburial of more than 2,000 leftist victims of Franco from the civil war; and replace the legislation against gender violence with another against “intra-family violence,” a keystone of Vox’s cultural battle against feminism. The left dubbed the inclusion of Vox in the Valencia government a “pact of shame,” which would only have been magnified, of course, on a national level. Going into Sunday’s voting, the hope was that nationally, the center-right would do well enough to squeak out an outright majority in the parliament and be able to do away with Vox entirely as part of a coalition.
Instead, Spain went the way, effectively, of neighboring France. There, voters have never been able to bring themselves to turn their country over to the far right and its leader Marine Le Pen. Still, last year they were ill inclined to give President Emmanuel Macron the absolute parliamentary majority which he’d governed for his first term.
The big difference is the nature of the two systems. France has a strong president as head of state. In Spain the leader of the government is chosen by the parliament, which is now as deeply fractured as it has ever been. We may just be back again in six months to try again. Stay tuned.
Cambodia: Coronation or election?
At least in Cambodia there was never any uncertainty who’d be left in charge after its election Sunday. Voters simply ratified the rule of the longest-tenured leader in Asia. They had little choice. The 38-year reign of 70-year-old Prime Minister Hun Sen is outdone only by African autocrats in Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, which Andelman Unleashed chronicled last November.
Hun Sen’s Cambodia People’s Party—which shares at least some of the political DNA of the eponymous Spanish party—swept to an overwhelming victory. Hardly surprising. Its members ran virtually unopposed since the only credible opposition, the Candlelight Party, was disqualified in May over some “registration irregularity.”
"We've won in a landslide...but we can't calculate the number of seats yet," Sok Eysan, spokesperson for the Cambodian People's Party, said without shame, not long after the “polls” closed.
And Hun Sen is doing his best to make sure his legacy lives on. Waiting in the wings—his 45-year-old son, General Hun Manet, to whom his dad said unashamedly he would hand over power at some still unspecified moment after Sunday’s election, while conceding quite transparently last month that he would “still control politics as the head of the ruling party.” Unsurprisingly, the son, General Manet, currently commander of the Cambodian army, swept to his first electoral victory Sunday and will take his seat as a member of the national parliament.
As it happens, Hun Sen was in Cambodia the same time I was in 1974 to 1975 when the Khmer Rouge seized power after a long and bloody civil war that turned into a holocaust, in process exterminating at least a million Cambodians. Born Hun Bunai, he changed his name to Hun Sen in 1972, two years after joining the Khmer Rouge as a soldier. He served as a battalion commander fighting against the American-backed forces of Lon Nol, lost an eye in the final assault on the capital, Phnom Penh, eventually defecting in 1977 and fighting with Vietnamese forces that invaded Cambodia, ousting the Khmer Rouge.
During his rule as prime minister, Hun has enriched himself and a cadre of businessmen, plundering the nation’s vast natural resources. At the same time, he has pivoted to an ever-closer relationship with China, which for decades played host to Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the titular leader of the Khmer Rouge and at whose behest Hun first joined the rebellion. Indeed, China happens today to be in somewhat of an adversarial position with Vietnam to which a number of leading western manufacturers have gravitated seeking an alternative venue for their activities.
Certainly, the results of Sunday’s vote suggest nothing here is likely to change anytime soon.
sometimes even an ignorant person like me has to find out what is going on in the world of politics, but not only ))
best wishes