MADRID (BLOOMBERG, AFP) - Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's Socialists are heading for a heavy electoral defeat in the country's most populous region of Andalusia on Sunday (June 19), highlighting the scale of the challenge he faces to win re-election in a national vote due next year.
Polling stations opened at 9am (3pm Singapore time) and will close at 8pm (2am Monday Singapore time), with final results expected a few hours later.
Mr Sanchez and his government have been struggling to cope with the economic fallout from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which has helped push inflation to the highest in more than three decades and sparked protests over soaring fuel prices in the euro area's fourth-largest economy.
Mr Sanchez has indicated he plans to call a general election in December next year, and although his PSOE party still has a small lead in national opinion polls, the gap to the conservative Popular Party has narrowed in recent months.
In office since 2018, the 50-year-old has also been plagued by regular run-ins with his junior partner in government, the far-left Podemos party.
According to recent polls, Mr Sanchez's Socialists will likely lose ground in Sunday's vote in Andalusia, the party's historical stronghold in the south that it lost in 2018 after 36 years in power.
The Popular Party (PP) is expected to double its support to more than 40 per cent and secure a near absolute majority of the 109 seats in the regional Parliament, a GAD3 survey published on Monday showed.
"Andalusia is a thermometer for national sentiment," said Dr Irene Delgado, a professor of political science at UNED University in Madrid. "The prime minister will have to pay close attention to the outcome in what used to be a bastion for the Socialists."
The PP's strong showing in the region around Seville is partly due to the popular current regional leader, Mr Juan Manuel Moreno, whose success is helping the party move on from a spying scandal that brought down its national leader earlier this year.
Even if the PP trounces the Socialists as predicted, it remains unclear whether it will be able to form a government without the far-right Vox party, which was formed by PP dissidents and which polls suggest will come in third on Sunday.
Vox already joined a regional administration for the first time when it partnered the PP in the Castile and Leon region after strong results in a February vote.
The PP's current coalition partner in Andalusia, the centre-right Ciudadanos, may not muster enough votes to win a single seat in the regional Parliament, and the embattled party is in danger of falling off the national political map.
With about 18 per cent of the country's population, Andalusia is a key battleground in a nation where politics is still overshadowed by the Catalan secession crisis. The southern region, which is the size of Portugal, is one of the poorest in the country.
