Spain’s culture wars boil over during a scorching summer election campaign

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You do not need to look at the weather forecast to know that it will be hot in Spain on Sunday. Summer is always scorching in the Iberian Peninsula, and this year has been even hotter than usual, with a ”heat dome” stuck over southern Europe.

That is not the only reason Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s decision to call a July 23 election looks like such a risky gamble. Mr. Sánchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party suffered a drubbing in May’s regional elections. Calling a snap national election on the heels of that result is something of a Hail Mary pass on Mr. Sánchez’s part.

Mr. Sánchez took power in 2018 by striking a coalition “feminist” government with the far-left Unidas Podemos (United We Can) after two previous elections produced hung parliaments. With a cabinet made up of Socialists and Podemos members, his government enacted Europe’s most progressive laws on sexual assault and transgender rights and promised justice for the families of victims of the late fascist dictator Francisco Franco.

Those measures – and the Socialist leader’s brand of strident progressive politics known as sanchismo – provoked a backlash among conservative Spaniards that the far-right Vox has seized on to become the number-three political party in the polls, with the support of about 15 per cent of voters. The centre-right People’s Party (PP) leads with around 30 per cent support, up from 21 per cent in the 2019 election, and a few percentage points ahead of Mr. Sánchez’s Socialists.

In this campaign, the economy has taken a back seat to the culture wars. Spain’s unemployment rate remains stuck above 12 per cent, and its debt-to-gross-domestic-product ratio hovers dangerously at around 113 per cent. But its politicians prefer to argue over Pride flags rather than productivity.

Vox leader Santiago Abascal rejects the term “gender-based violence” as an “ideological concept,” preferring the term “intrafamilial violence.” At a rally last month, he said he did not celebrate Pride “because I am a heterosexual.” His party also favours a hardline approach with Basque and Catalonian nationalists, denouncing pardons that Mr. Sánchez’s government granted to Catalonian separatists who organized an illegal referendum in 2017.

Mr. Sánchez’s entire campaign strategy has revolved around raising the spectre of a PP-Vox coalition that would roll back abortion and LGBT rights after the election to rally progressive voters to turn out on Sunday. That explains his election gamble; the fear of Franco-sympathizers in Vox sharing power is indeed a chilling prospect for many Spaniards.

PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo, a moderate at heart, has mostly evaded questions about a possible coalition with Vox. But his party is unlikely to win an outright majority of the 350 seats in Spain’s Congress. And Mr. Sánchez has been able to point to the pacts recently made between PP and Vox leaders in Extremadura and Valencia to take power in those regions to warn of the consequences of a PP-Vox coalition government at the national level.

“In this country there are male chauvinists who murder women, and you are making a pact with a sexist party that does not condemn male violence against women,” Mr. Sánchez charged last week in a televised one-on-one debate with Mr. Feijóo.

Unfortunately for Mr. Sánchez, the issue of gender-based violence cuts both ways. His government’s sexual consent legislation, known in Spanish as the Solo si es si (Only Yes Means Yes) law, was so poorly written that it resulted in hundreds of convicted rapists earning early release from prison. That was because the new law (which has since been amended) ended a previous distinction between sexual abuse and sexual aggression, resulting in lower minimum sentences for some violent crimes.

“Those male chauvinists who raped women are out on the street because of you,” Mr. Feijóo shot back at his Socialist rival in an exchange that backfired on Mr. Sánchez.

The botched sexual-consent legislation led to a split between Mr. Sánchez and Irene Montero, the equality minister and Podemos politician who piloted the bill through Congress. A lightning rod for right-wing politicians, Ms. Montero has been sidelined in this campaign and her party has become a spent force in Spanish politics. A new leftist party, Sumar (its name is based on the Spanish verb “to add”), has emerged under leader Yolanda Diaz, a former Communist who promises to provide a 20,000-euro “universal inheritance” to every Spaniard who turns 18. Needless to say, she is popular with young Spaniards.

If the PP and Vox fail to win a combined 176 seats on Sunday, Mr. Sánchez might be able to hold on to power by striking a pact with Sumar and Basque and Catalonian nationalists – though that would hardly justify his decision to call Spaniards to the polls in the heat of July.