Madrid: Spain’s opposition conservative party retained control of Galicia, its traditional stronghold, in a tight regional election on Sunday, a boost for its under-fire leader.
The Popular Party (PP) won 47.5 percent of the vote, giving it an absolute majority of 40 seats in the 75-seat regional parliament, official results with 95.5 percent of the vote counted showed.
The party has governed Galicia since 2009, winning majorities in each of the last four elections under Alberto Nunez Feijoo who in 2022 left the rural northwestern region of some 2.7 million residents to become national party leader.
Polls in recent weeks had suggested the race was tightening, raising the possibility that a surging left-wing nationalist BNG party and Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialists might together secure an absolute majority to oust the PP from power.
The BNG did boost its results, getting 25 seats, picking up votes at the expense of the Socialist party, which only won nine.
But even though the PP won two fewer seats than at the last election in 2020, it still has enough to continue to govern alone.
The election came as Feijoo was under fire after he announced last weekend he was in favour of granting a conditional pardon to the former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont over his role in the region’s failed 2017 independence push.
He said he had even studied “for 24 hours” an amnesty for separatists before ruling it out.
Under his leadership, the PP has consistently blasted Sanchez for offering an amnesty to Puigdemont and hundreds of other Catalan separatists in exchange for parliamentary support from two Catalan separatist groups to form a new government following July’s inconclusive national elections.
Feijoo has repeatedly called the controversial amnesty — which still must be approved by parliament — a “humiliation” and the PP has staged large demonstrations against it.
His apparent U-turn upset members of his party and left him open to accusations of hypocrisy. “In the morning he negotiates a rally and pardons and in the afternoon, he protests against the separatists,” Sanchez said Thursday at a campaign rally in Galicia.
