Vox

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• The election was called early.
• At the same time, the polls saw the Socialist Party (PSOE) and Sumar (a grand coalition of left-wing parties) losing votes.

Seat mathematics

• In the Spanish parliamentary system the election of the prime minister takes place in the 350-seat Congress of Deputies.
• The PP, the winner of the elections, has won 136 seats and Vox 33, totalling 169 between them.
• In other words, the PSOE and its partners are a little closer to forming a government than the PP.

What happened?

• Only the public polls of the CIS (Sociological National Research Agency) showed the PSOE as the winner.
• An important structural element is the will consolidated in the 1978 Spanish Constitution for all regions to be represented in Congress.
• The results were therefore skewed by the absence of votes from the Basque Country, Catalonia and Andalusia, among others.
• The electorate also appears to have been unclear about what the limits of a PP pact with Vox would be.

What happens now?

• If its candidate gets enough support in a first vote (absolute majority), the king will name a prime minister.
• If not, 48 hours later another vote will be held in which a simple majority will be sought.
• Currently, PP is asking PSOE to reach an agreement with it and allow Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of PP, to become prime minister.

The EU Council presidency

• From 1 July until 31 December, Spain holds the presidency of the Council of the European Union.
• EU institutions are used to changes of government, as they are in an eternal electoral cycle in the member states.
• Amid a possible deadlock in Spain and an end-of-year general election, Pedro Sanchez would lead Spain for almost the entirety of its presidency of the council.

• Two questions will keep analysts busy until well after the election.
• First, will it be possible to form a government supported by a stable majority in parliament?

From regional and municipal elections to general elections

• The parties in the Spanish governing coalition suffered a historic defeat in the May 28 regional and municipal elections.
• Before the regional elections, these two parties led five and nine regions, respectively.
• The PP, for its part, absorbed Ciudadanos, a right-wing party whose centrist turn was obviously a failure and who gave up running in the general elections.
• Vox, for its part, has made significant progress compared to previous regional and municipal elections, and holds the balance of power in five regions won by the PP.

Democracy against the far right?

• In 2019, he called early elections in November, after being elected a minority during the April election.
• He hopes to dampen the conservative momentum in the hope that the PP and Vox will run out of a majority.
• In the May 28 elections, the PP and Vox won 38.68 per cent of the vote, which, in the general election, would result in 160 seats, far from the 176 needed for a parliamentary majority.

The left bets on unity

• The election campaign coincides with negotiations on the formation of coalitions to govern the autonomous regions.
• In order to better deal with the threat posed by the far right, the left is committed to unity.
• Political forces to the left of the PSOE rallied in a new party, Sumar, led by outgoing Labour Minister Yolanda Díaz.

The right hesitates, then assumes its alliances

• To counter the socialist call to block the far right, Feijóo’s PP adjusted its strategy.
• He first called on Vox to let his party govern the regions where he came out on top without making concessions to the far right.

The left has few allies

• This change of course reflects a persistent problem for the PP: in a fragmented party system, the right has few potential allies in parliament, deeming alliances with the Basque and Catalan nationalist parties illegitimate.
• To those who ask him about the risks of a coalition with Vox, Feijóo passes the ball back to Sánchez with what many see as a false equivalence.

Voter turnout, a key element for socialists

• Voter turnout will be a key element of socialist success, but elections held in the summer tend to demobilize the electorate, which risks benefiting the right.
• In this context, Sánchez wants to force his opponent to debate, while Feijóo is happy with a weak engagement of the electorate.

Calculated risk?

• For now, polls show the PP winning, but a coalition with Vox may not be enough to give it a majority.
• Under the circumstances, Sánchez clings to the hope of staying in power despite the expected victory of the PP.

• There were an estimated 750 people on board, 70 were confirmed to have died and only 104 were rescued from the wreckage – leaving many unaccounted for.
• In March, another shipwreck, this time off Italy, left nearly 100 people dead.
• The figures, driven in part by the war in Ukraine, even exceed those during the Mediterranean refugee crisis between 2015 and 2016.

Migration in Southern Europe

• As has been the case this year with the shipwrecks referred to above, the focus of this crisis was in southern Europe.
• In June of that year, in Spain, the arrival of the Aquarius boat marked a turning point.
• One of the demands made by these countries, and which is precisely behind the declaration of a migration emergency in Italy, is the need for migration management at the European level, as the burden of managing arrivals falls almost exclusively on the national authorities, when it is a European challenge.

Hate in the media

• But the phenomenon of racism and rejection of migrants is very complex, and is often related to the representation of these people in the media.
• This project has recently resulted in a book, entitled Migrants and Refugees in Southern Europe Beyond the News Stories: Photographs, Hate and Journalists’ Perceptions.

Observations of concern

• It was found that mainstream media in Mediterranean countries are dominated by those frames that depict migrants as victims or as a burden.
• Moreover, negative frames (both those portraying migrants as a burden and those identifying them as a threat) have grown significantly between 2014 and 2019.
• Although the pattern is shared across the three countries, it is the Greek media that make a substantially more negative representation of migration through their frames.

How to reverse this situation

In order to achieve a more humane representation of migration in the media, we propose three strategies:
• This is necessary to tell the whole story, so as not to limit migrants to a mass in front of our borders.
• David Blanco-Herrero receives funding from the Ministry of Universities under the FPU programme (ref.