Spain’s establishment conservative People’s Party (PP) is in crisis as its leader has been pressured to resign and the populist party VOX is now ahead of the PP in several new polls.
An opinion poll released on Wednesday, February 23rd by the firm Electomania has populist party VOX in second place with 23 per cent, just four percentage points behind the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), and well ahead of the People’s Party (PP) which scored just 17 per cent in the poll.
The poll shows that if an election were called, VOX would likely win as many as 92 seats in the Spanish parliament, nearly doubling its current number of seats, which stands at 52.
Earlier this month, VOX polled ahead of the PP to become the second-largest political force in Spain for the first time in a shock poll and comes as the party has seen a meteoric rise since the 2016 national elections when the party received just 0.2 per cent of the vote.
As VOX has risen in the polls, the PP has collapsed as it faces infighting between PP leader Pablo Casado and Madrid’s regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso, with accusations by Ayuso that Casado and his allies had hired private detectives to attempt to discredit her.
Casado has also accused Ayuso of being linked to possible corruption, claiming that her brother had taken €1.5 million (£1,252,119/$1,696,065) worth of regional government cash for facemask purchases during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
“It is very painful when leaders of your party, instead of supporting you, are the ones who want to destroy you,” Díaz Ayuso said last week.
The PP leader later stated that the party would be conducting an investigation into Ayuso, a firm opponent of coronavirus restrictions, claiming there had been enough evidence to “conclude that there has been influence peddling,” but later backtracked.
This week, reports indicated that Casado will likely step down as leader of the PP and that the party will call an extraordinary congress to replace him as party leader.
The newspaper El Diario reported Wednesday that Casado is looking to hang on as leader of the PP until the congress where he will likely resign. The congress was called after several deputy secretaries offered an ultimatum to Casado, stating that if he did not call for the congress, they would resign.
The infighting within the PP comes after the regional election in Castile and Leon earlier this month in which the party came first in the vote but did not score a majority, while VOX set a new election record for the party in the region, winning 17.6 per cent of the vote, increasing their seat count from one to 13.
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