Spain in Limbo as Catalans, Basques Emerge Kingmakers

MADRID/BARCELONA (Reuters) -- Spain was trapped in a political gridlock on Monday after right-wing parties failed to clinch a decisive victory and no clear winner emerged from a national election, leaving pro-independence Catalan and Basque parties as potential kingmakers.

The results from Sunday’s vote left neither the left-wing nor right-wing blocs with an easy path to form a government.
A second election is a possible outcome. The centre-right People’s Party (PP) and the far-right Vox won a combined 169 seats in parliament - short of the 176 seats needed for a majority and confounding poll predictions. The ruling Socialists (PSOE) and far-left Sumar won 153.
After winning the most seats, the PP will be given the first stab at trying to cobble together enough votes in parliament to win a prime-ministerial investiture vote.
But its alliance with the far-right Vox and tough stance on separatism will make it difficult to gain support from any other faction.
The results showed the deep divisions in Spanish society.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called the elections in a gamble after his Socialist Party took a drubbing in local elections in May.
His political opponents highlighted his reliance on the regional separatist parties, saying this threatened the nation itself.
The PP however, had looked set to need a alliance with Vox to govern, an outcome that would have brought hardline nationalists into government for the first time since the end of the Franco dictatorship and Spain’s return to democracy in the 1970s.
As it happened, the Socialists performed better than polls had predicted, helped by a last-minute gaffes by Feijoo.
Feijoo nonetheless claimed victory.
Sanchez’s Socialists have more options for forming a government but face potentially unpalatable demands from Catalan separatist parties. Those will include insistence on an independence referendum, triggering the kind of political chaos seen in 2017 when Catalonia last tried to break from Spain.
Sanchez could win over left-wing separatist party Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), as he did to form a minority government in 2020. But he will likely also need the backing of the more hardline Junts, which has not supported Sanchez in the past four years.
The Catalan leader who is emerging as potential kingmaker is Junts party leader Carles Puigdemont, who living in self-imposed exile in Belgium since the failed independence bid.