The PP wins in the four provinces, and the Bloc, in Vigo, the main city

Unquestionable victory of the Popular Party in the four provinces and in the vast majority of the 313 municipalities of Galicia.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
18 February 2024 Sunday 10:28
10 Reads
The PP wins in the four provinces, and the Bloc, in Vigo, the main city

Unquestionable victory of the Popular Party in the four provinces and in the vast majority of the 313 municipalities of Galicia. The formation led in these elections by Alfonso Rueda revalidates the victory obtained on July 12, 2020 in all Galician demarcations; gathers practically all the votes of the regional right, with the sole exception of the province of Ourense, where the Democràcia d'Ourense party bursts onto the scene; and attends without suffering a single scratch to the failure of the PSOE, which sees how the BNG also widens the difference in the fight for the hegemony of the left to the four territories.

The populists repeat in seats the result achieved three and a half years ago in the last Galician elections, by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, in two of the four provinces, Pontevedra and Ourense, and add a more than acceptable loss of a single deputy in the A Coruña and Lugo.

The electoral map by provinces resulting from yesterday's elections, and in the absence of counting the vote from abroad, which usually plays in favor of the PP, is very similar to the one drawn by the 2020 elections, held in a context of exit from the pandemic. Only the significant transfer of votes from the PSOE to the BNG modifies the electoral boundaries, although it does not cause significant changes in the correlation of forces between the right and the left. The Bloc grows in the four provinces (one deputy in Lugo and Ourense and two in A Coruña and Pontevedra), but for the purposes of a possible turn and a change of color in the regional government, the result of the nationalist formation, the best in its history both in percentage and in seats, it has been insufficient.

The disaster of the PSOE is widespread throughout the autonomous community. The formation led in these elections by José Ramón Gómez Besteiro barely saves the furniture in the constituency of Lugo, where it equals the two seats of the previous appointment with the ballot boxes. The fall of the Socialists is particularly hard in Pontevedra, where they lose more than 8 points compared to the elections of July 2020. The PSOE is also bleeding in Ourense, where Democràcia d'Ourense is ahead and sends it to fourth position.

In previous elections, the Popular Party had been the leading political force in the 15 most populous municipalities in Galicia, including Vigo and A Coruña, the only two cities with more than 200,000 inhabitants and both currently governed by socialist mayors. Yesterday, the PP repeated this status of first local force in autonomous regions in 13 of those 15 main councils, although the boom in the urban vote of the Galician Nationalist Bloc at the expense of the PSOE is particularly noticeable in Vigo. In this city, the formation led in these elections by Ana Pontón is the main political force, surpassing the Popular Party by more than 2,000 votes and relegating the PSOE of the charismatic mayor Abel Caballero (who in 2020 had lost by just over 700 votes the fights with the popular ones for the first position) to a painful third place, almost 17 percentage points from the BNG. It happens that the Bloc is also the winner of these elections in the municipality of Pontevedra de Redondela, which closes the ranking of the 15 Galician municipalities with the most inhabitants.

In the provincial capitals, the magnificent result of the PP in the municipality of Lugo stands out, where the winning formation of these elections obtained an absolute majority.