Historic election defeat for the Spanish Socialists led by Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez Switzerland loses points in the ranking of the most corrupt countries in the world

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist Party (PSOE) has suffered a historic defeat in the regional elections in Galicia.

With just 14 percent of the vote, the Socialists recorded their worst result in history on Sunday in the so-called autonomous community in the northwest. The PSdeG, the name of the party in the region north of Portugal, will lose five of its fourteen seats in the Santiago de Compostela parliament, as the electoral authority has announced. Regional President Alfonso Rueda’s conservative People’s Party PP won 47.4 percent and defended its absolute majority with 40 out of a total of 75 deputies, even though the party lost two seats.

“The PP wins in Galicia and Sánchez leads the PSOE to disaster,” was the headline in the newspaper ‘El Mundo’ on Monday. The newspaper ‘El País’, which is much closer to the Socialists than ‘El Mundo’, also wrote: ‘The PSOE is collapsing.’

The elections in Galicia were seen as a benchmark for Sánchez’s work following the Socialist’s re-election last fall. What is particularly controversial in Spain is the amnesty that the left-wing government in Madrid has planned for separatists in the Catalonia region.

The left-wing Bloque Nacionalista Galego (BNG/Nationalist Bloc of Galicia) led by top candidate Ana Pontón benefited from the fall of the Socialists and achieved the best result in its history with 31.6 percent of the vote and 25 MPs (six more than before ). ). The BNG strives for the independence of Galicia, but rejects the so-called one-sided path that the Catalans took in the failed attempt at secession in the autumn of 2017. (sda/dpa)