Reading the runes for Spain’s general election

IN JANUARY 2017 in Dos Hermanas, a large dormitory town outside Seville, Pedro Sánchez launched a bid to regain the leadership of Spain’s Socialist Party, from which he had been ousted in an internal coup three months earlier. Few in the Madrid political establishment gave him a chance, yet after months driving from rally to rally in his 12-year old Peugeot 407 he won his job back in a party primary. Last May he showed the same determination and sense of opportunity when he organised a censure motion that installed him as prime minister of a minority government at the expense of Mariano Rajoy, a conservative whose People’s Party (PP) has been tarnished by corruption.

This month Mr Sánchez returned in triumph to Dos Hermanas to launch his party’s campaign for a general election on April 28th. In the past ten months “we haven’t been able to change Spain,” he told some 2,000 supporters. But “we have set the course towards a fairer Spain.” In what is the third general election in little over three years, opinion polls suggest the Socialists will be easily the largest party for the first time since the election in 2008, gaining perhaps 50 seats on top of their current 84 in the 350-member Congress of Deputies. That would still leave Mr Sánchez well short of a majority, because Spanish politics has become extraordinarily fragmented and fluid. Indeed, the polls suggest that some 40% of voters, an unusually high figure, remain undecided.