MADRID (Reuters) – Spain’s far-right Vox party is open to forming national and regional governing coalitions with the mainstream conservative People’s Party (PP), Vox leader Santiago Abascal said on Monday after right-wing parties won a regional election.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called a snap national election for July earlier on Monday, in response to the heavy defeat that his Socialist Party (PSOE) and their far-left junior ally Podemos suffered in Sunday’s ballot.
Abascal said his party would be open to “creating an alternative” to Sanchez alongside the PP.
PP, the second-largest party in the national parliament behind the PSOE, is now in position to govern alone in two regions and with Vox as a junior partner in six others.
Sunday’s results also indicate that the PP and the anti-immigrant and anti-separatist Vox could unseat Sanchez if they were replicated at national parliamentary level.
Asked if he would offer the deputy prime minister job to PP leader Alberto Nunez Feijoo if Vox came first in the national election, Abascal replied: “If we get a majority, yes”.
In national elections in 2019, Vox garnered just over 15% of the vote and became the third-largest party in parliament, with 52 lawmakers out of the chamber’s 350.
Abascal said Sanchez called the snap election because he thought he could benefit from the move, but “his administration is over”.
(Reporting by Inti Landauro; Writing by David Latona; Editing by Andrei Khalip and John Stonestreet)
