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Rabat – In the Spanish general elections on Sunday, November 10, the far-right Vox party picked up Ceuta’s singular seat in Spain’s lower house, the Congress of Deputies. For the Senate, residents in Ceuta split the vote, sending one Vox politician and one center-right People’s Party politician to Madrid.
Sunday was the first time voters in Ceuta, the Spanish enclave in Morocco, voted in larger numbers for Vox, a political party founded in 2013, than for any other party.
In Spain’s general elections in April, the central-left socialist party (PSOE) won Ceuta’s lower house seat.
Vox won nearly 12,000 votes in Ceuta, representing 35% of the votes. Voters in Melilla elected a center-right People’s Party politician.
Spain’s socialist party retained hold of the most seats (120) of any party in the lower house. But Spain’s two largest parties on the right each picked up more seats than they had won in the April general election. The People’s Party won 88 seats, making it the second largest party in Spain, and Vox won 52 seats, making it the third largest.
Having gained 28 more seats than in April, Vox has more than doubled its deputies in the lower house.
With the success of the People’s Party and Vox, the socialist party did not win enough seats to form a government with other leftist parties, such as far-left party Podemos. Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, after failing to form a government by a September deadline, had hoped to secure more seats for his socialist party to end months of deadlock.
Read also: Spain’s Pedro Sanchez: Morocco ‘Essential Partner’ for Spain, Europe
Vox is seen as an anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim party. The far-right party has proposed that the government should close down “fundamentalist” mosques.
Ceuta is the scene of many attempts at irregular migration for Moroccans and sub-Saharan migrants. Migrants regularly attempt to scale the fences at the enclave cities of Ceuta and Melilla or to swim from the Moroccan side to the Spanish side of the border.
The leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, has called for Spain to build a wall around Ceuta and Melilla to prevent irregular immigration, saying that Morocco should pay for it.
Vox has also proposed that Spain should deport all illegal migrants and any legal migrants who have committed a crime.
