Photos: Sergio Betancort
The PP of Lanzarote experienced one of its blackest election nights this Sunday after a "tremendous" fall that they did not expect, as recognized by both the president of the Lanzarote Popular Party, Ástrid Pérez, and the candidate for the Senate, Joel Delgado, who with 98.28% counted, has lost more than 3,800 votes compared to the elections to the Upper House in 2016.
Specifically, Delgado has obtained 9,324 votes compared to the 13,131 he received three years ago and which led him to occupy the senator's seat in the last legislature. Thus, in the elections this Sunday, the PP has positioned itself as the third force in the elections to the Senate for Lanzarote, after the PSOE and CC, which, with just over 1% of the votes to be counted, had achieved 15,673 and 9,625 votes respectively.
"We will have to reflect and make short-term decisions," said the PP candidate for the Upper House, who congratulated "as it cannot be otherwise" the new senator for Lanzarote, Manuel Fajardo Palarea, to whom he wished "all the luck in the world". "I believe that he has a lot of work ahead of him, that he has to assume many demands that we have as a territory and I wish him good luck and success," he said.
Furthermore, even worse were the results obtained by the Lanzarote PP in Congress, where it also went from first to third force but lost even more votes, some 5,500, dropping from the 14,281 it obtained in 2016 to only 7,795, which represents a drop of almost 15 percentage points (from 28.32% to 13.50%).
"The fragmentation of the right has killed us"
But, above all, the PP has experienced a great collapse at the national level, where it has only obtained 66 deputies in Congress compared to the 137 it obtained in the 2016 elections, and 56 senators compared to the 130 it achieved three years ago. A fall that the PP of Lanzarote considers to have occurred as a consequence of "the fragmentation of the right". "It has killed us," said the president of the Lanzarote Popular Party, Ástrid Pérez.
"We had been warning for some time that the fragmentation of the right was going to make Pedro Sánchez the winner, due to the D'hont Law, because the remaining votes go to the most voted party," added Pérez, who nevertheless recognized that she "did not think" that the PP was going to fall so much.
"Many votes have been thrown away that have not obtained a seat and that have benefited the PSOE. The sum of the three rights would have meant that the PSOE would not have won the elections, but we will have to reflect on whether the electoral strategies of all the parties that are in the same ideological spectrum are reasonable or not," said the PP candidate for the Senate, Joel Delgado.
Regarding the Canary Islands as a whole, the PP has fallen to become the third force in Congress, receiving 164,472 votes compared to the 333,445 it achieved in the elections three years ago. Thus, of the six deputies for the archipelago that it obtained in 2016, it has gone to three.
They hope to "turn around" the results in the local elections
However, despite the fall of the PP registered in Spain and the Canary Islands as a whole and that in Lanzarote they have also lost almost half of the votes to Congress, positioning themselves as the third force on the island, both Ástrid Pérez and Joel Delgado have expressed their hope that these results will "turn around" in the local elections.
It should be remembered that Francisco Cabrera, who was already a deputy of the party, was running as number four for Congress for the province of Las Palmas, who at least until a few minutes before eleven o'clock at night had not appeared at the party headquarters. Among the well-known faces that had done so, apart from Ástrid Pérez and Joel Delgado, were the candidate for the Cabildo, Jacobo Medina, and the current councilor of the first island institution, Ángel Vázquez.
