Spain’s conservatives and far-right Vox increase ties with Andalucía coalition

Deal including ‘national priority’ policy brings prospect closer of countrywide agreement between parties

The prospect of a national coalition between Spain’s conservative People’s party (PP) and the far-right Vox party has drawn closer still after the two groupings sealed another deal that will allow the PP to continue ruling the southern region of Andalucía.

The PP, which has governed the former socialist bastion for the past seven years, lost its absolute majority in May’s regional election , forcing it to look to Vox to help it stay in power in Spain’s most populous region.

The incumbent PP regional president, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, had hoped to govern alone to avoid depending on Vox, which has been seeking to drag the PP further to the right in regional coalitions by insisting Spanish-born people receive priority over those born abroad for housing and public services.

Although Moreno had rubbished Vox’s so-called “national priority” policy as “a sensationalistic but empty slogan” during the campaign, the coalition agreement, signed on Thursday, explicitly guarantees “national priority in accessing public benefits”. The agreement also rejects the immigration policies of Spain’s socialist-led central government and says Andalucía will not accept any more unaccompanied migrant children.

Other priorities include opposing “the imposition of ideological agendas when it comes to caring for the environment”, defending intensive livestock farming “in the face of criminalisation from the animal rights lobby and the climate policies developed in Brussels”, and protecting and preserving bullfighting.

As in other regions where the PP and Vox govern in coalition – Extremadura, Aragón and Castilla y León – the new Andalucían government wants to overturn legislation that was introduced four years ago to bring “justice, reparation and dignity” to the victims of the civil war and the subsequent Franco dictatorship.

It intends to replace it with a so-called “harmony law”, which the national government, historical memory associations and UN experts have all decried as a blatant attempt to whitewash, justify or eradicate the horrors of the Franco era.

Moreno hailed the coalition pact as a “sensible, fair and legal legislative agreement” that would bring four years of stability, while his boss, the national PP leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, paid tribute to the returning regional president’s “commitment, capacity for dialogue, and vocation of service”.

Vox’s leader in Andalucía, Manuel Gavira – who will serve as a regional vice-president – said the deal would ensure a government “that defends common sense and improves the lives of the people of Andalucía”.

May’s regional election proved a disaster for the Spanish Socialist Worker’s party (PSOE), which is led by the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez. It dropped from 30 seats to 28 in the 109-seat regional parliament – its worst ever result in Andalucía. The PP, despite finishing first, decreased its seat count from 58 to 53, while Vox picked up another seat to finish with 15.

The leftwing Adelante Andalucía party climbed from two seats to eight, and the leftist coalition Por Andalucía held on to the five seats it won four years ago.

Sánchez’s inner circle and his party are being battered by a series of corruption cases as Spain gears up for next year’s general election. The polls suggest the PP will finish first but may struggle to secure an outright majority, leaving it dependent on Vox to govern nationally.

Feijóo has repeatedly refused to rule out a national coalition with Vox. In a recent TV interview, the PP leader – who was touted as the man who would bring the party back to the centre ground when he was appointed four years ago – said that while he hoped to govern alone, he had no intention of “demonising” Vox.

“If it turns out that we need to make a deal for a coalition government, we’ll sit down and we’ll form a government coalition that’s in line with the basic principles of our parties and we’ll set out a series of red lines that I won’t cross,” he told Antena 3’s El Hormiguero last month.

The PSOE’s organisational secretary, Rebeca Torró, said the Andalucía deal showed that there was no such thing as a “moderate PP” or a “hardline PP”, adding: “There’s only a PP that’s exactly the same as Vox.”

Torró said that each such alliance followed a familiar playbook: “Backward steps in equality, attacks on the rights of LGBTI people, a weakening of public services, a questioning of climate change, and the normalisation of speech that jeopardises rights and freedoms that were hard-won over the course of decades.”

Feijóo’s predecessor Pablo Casado was weakened by his inability to decide how to respond to growing competition from Vox. Despite relying on Vox to prop up three regional PP governments, he eventually turned on the far-right party in an incendiary speech to congress six years ago .

“You brag about being populists with your demagoguery that offers easy – and usually fake – solutions to complex problems,” said Casado. “The People’s party doesn’t want to be another party of fear, of rage, of resentment and revenge, of insults and skirmishes, nor of manipulation, lies and backwards opposition.”