Despite the heat and summer holidays, voters in Spain turned out for today’s parliamentary elections in larger numbers than in November 2019, reports Anadolu.
By 2 p.m., 40.48 percent of the 37.4 million inhabitants with the right to vote had voted. In the previous elections, 37.92 percent of voters voted at the same time.
Many citizens, under the impact of the third heat wave in the country, waited since nine o’clock in the morning in front of the polling stations.
So far, the highest turnout is in the southeastern province of Valencia, where more than 46 percent of voters voted. It is possible that the citizens went out there earlier because of the extremely high temperatures in that area.
Close to 2.5 million voters therefore voted by mail earlier, and the mailmen are delivering their completed ballots to the polling stations today. This is a record number of votes collected by mail. They were not included in the 40.48 percent of votes collected by 2 p.m.
After the voting, the leaders of the political parties called on the public to vote in the elections. They thanked them for their response in atypical summer conditions.
The polls close at 8 p.m. and it is still uncertain whether the turnout will surpass that of four years ago.
Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called elections for July instead of December after his party suffered heavy defeats in local and regional elections in May.
Sanchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) has been in power since 2019 and governs the Mediterranean country in coalition with the left-wing Unidas Podemos, with support from the separatist parties of Catalonia and the Basque Country.
Several polls indicated that the center-right opposition People’s Party led by Albert Fei could get the most votes, and that it could form a government with the far-right Vox.
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