It wasn’t just Spanish boaters feeling blindsided and rudely attacked this past week. Like the yachts sailing through the Straights of Gibraltar who ran into orcas with attitudes schooled in the arts of maritime destruction by a she-whale named White Gladis, the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) – led by Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez – received a thumping of epic proportions this past Saturday. The results have stove in a section of the Socialist hull, left them rudderless, and they are bailing water madly.

Spain’s ruling Socialists suffered heavy losses to opposition conservatives in Sunday’s local election, with around 95% of the votes counted, showing their electoral vulnerability ahead of an end-of-year general election.

Only three of the 12 regions holding elections will retain Socialist dominance by very narrow margins, with the rest likely go to the conservative People’s Party, albeit with coalitions or informal support agreements with the far-right Vox party.

…The main setbacks for the Socialists came from losses in the Valencia, Aragon and Balearic Island regions, as well as in one of the most important Socialist fiefdoms, the southwestern Spanish region of Extremadura.

“The tsunami that has swept through all the Spanish regions today has also swept through us,” Javier Lamban, the outgoing Socialist president of Aragon, told a press conference where he admitted defeat.

It seems the five-year-old Sanchez government had worn out its welcome with a majority of the people over wrangling with and taxing corporations – as socialists are wont to do – as well as some of the concessions they’d had to make to partners to keep the ruling coalition afloat. One of the assurances Alberto Núñez Feijóo, head of the People’s Party (PP), made while campaigning was that his party would be a whole lot friendlier to business in general.

…The PP on Sunday won 31.5% of municipal votes nationwide, up from 22% in 2019, while the Socialists fell to 28%. Vox more than doubled its votes to 7%. Feijoo has promised to be more business-friendly than Sanchez, who has had a contentious relationship with corporate Spain.

…The Sanchez government had riled up executives and wealthier Spaniards by imposing windfall taxes on energy companies and banks as well as a wealth tax to help offset rising costs. Spain has also received more than 50% of the €69.6 billion ($74.6 billion) in grants allocated to it from the European Union’s pandemic-era recovery fund.

In government, voters weren’t convinced by Sanchez’s stewardship of the economy, despite Spain outperforming most of its euro-area peers during the first part of the year. Sanchez pumped billions of euros into the economy to shield households and businesses from rising costs amid a surge in inflation.

Another misstep Sanchez had stumbled to recover from was implementation of a rewritten rape statute called the “Only yes means yes” law, which had been a priority of one of his coalition partners.

Spain’s congress has passed legislation referred to as the “only yes means yes law”, drawn up in the wake of the “wolf pack” gang rape in 2016.

…Under the new law consent must be affirmative and cannot be assumed to have been given by default or silence.

The events that led to the law – and I guess happened frequently enough in Spain that this was even an issue, hard as it is for Americans to believe – are horrific by any standard and you’d think, “So, what’s the problem?”

Too many chefs in the socialists kitchen.

The simplest way to explain it is that no one was paying attention to the immediate ramifications when they rewrote the rape definition. Expanding the definition of “sexual assault” also meant penalties had to be readjusted, in many cases lowered, and suddenly there were something like 1000 early release sex offenders either back on the streets or shortly to be so because of reduced sentences.

People were unhappy and Sanchez’s panicked hot footing around to “look at closing the loophole” wasn’t making anyone any happier.

Spain’s government is scrambling to close a loophole in a law it introduced that has inadvertently led to the reduction of jail sentences for sex offenders and created new tensions between the leftist coalition partners.

The Guarantee of Sexual Freedom law — also known as the “Only yes means yes law” — means that it is no longer necessary to show that violence or intimidation were used in a sexual assault. Introduced in October, it aims to favor victims of such attacks and ensure consent in sexual relations.

“Oops. Sorry,” didn’t cut it with voters who punished the party – and coalition partner Podemos who pushed the law – Saturday for the poorly drafted legislation.

…“I ask victims for forgiveness for these undesired effects,” Sánchez told the El Correo newspaper on Sunday. “I don’t think any MP, including those … who voted against the law, is OK with lowering the sentences of sexual aggressors.”

Spanish voters were also not too fond of the socialists (again, as is their wont), cozying up to terrorists when convenient.

…The prime minister has alienated some Spaniards by relying on the parliamentary votes of Catalan separatists and a Basque secessionist party, whose electoral candidates included 44 convicted members of Eta, the disbanded terrorist group, among them seven found guilty of violent crimes….

But the PP didn’t come out completely on top…

…But the PP did not secure the absolute majorities it wanted in many regional and municipal legislatures, meaning a new era for the Spanish right that will entail coalitions or voting pacts with Vox in order to form many governments.

With Vox securing 7.2 per cent of the municipal vote, the results also raised the spectre of a PP-Vox national coalition if the right prevails in the general election. That would make it the first hard-right party in the central government since Spain’s return to democracy more than 40 years ago.

…which led to a surprise move yesterday by Sanchez. He has called for an early election in the hopes that he can stave off an utter and complete disaster by striking before the PP can get their national campaign act together.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said he will dissolve parliament and call a snap election for July 23 after his Socialist party suffered heavy losses in regional and local elections on Sunday.

Sanchez’s decision to bring forward a general election not expected until December looks like a ploy to wrest the initiative back from his conservative opponents after seeing his support hit by near-record food inflation and a botched attempt to tighten sentencing for rapists. The timing of the vote will ramp up the pressure on Sanchez’s leftist coalition partners who have been struggling to resolve a dispute over whether they can unite under a single banner.

The ballots showed a remarkable coalescing of fractured former voting patterns into more of a traditional set-up, so this might not be a winning gamble for Sanchez.

…The counting showed a return to a two-party system dominated by the PSOE and PP after a decade of greater involvement by smaller parties such as the left-wing Podemos and centrist Ciudadanos, which appeared largely to have lost its seats to the PP.

Is the romance finally over with all the various fringe parties?

July 23 is going to come pretty quickly.

Better start running.