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       MADRID — For drag queen Onyx, makeup on Spain’s election day became war paint. In a blitz of Twitter videos, she rallied liberals to the polls to defeat the anti-LBGTQ+, anti-feminist climate deniers of the far-right Vox party.

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       By 1 a.m. — amid losses for the far right and surprising gains for the left — she addressed her followers in triumph. “It was all worth it,” Onyx said in another video blast. “Congratulations to all my queers, brave fighters and bold ones who had [the guts] to go and vote. You did what you should do, which is to exercise your democratic right. Ole!”

       If election night here proved anything, it’s that Spain — a nation with some of the most recent memories in Europe of extreme-right repression, from the Francisco Franco era that ended in 1975 — still has little interest in reembracing the radical right.

       Vox only marginally underperformed expectations in Sunday’s race, winning a handful fewer seats than some analysts predicted. But when compared with its last national showing in November of 2019, the result stood as a stark defeat. The party slipped from 15 percent to 12 percent of the vote and lost 19 of its 52 preliminary seats. In one region where Vox is already co-ruling in local government — Castilla y León — it lost five of its six seats.

       The extent of the party’s losses meant that it couldn’t play the predicted role of kingmaker on election night. In fact, the prospect of a coalition with the far right may have been more of a liability than an asset for the center-right Popular Party (PP), which came in first in Sunday’s elections but without enough votes to govern on its own or with Vox as its sole partner.

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       In the chaos of the hung parliament delivered by Spanish voters, the PP and Vox are now scrambling — with their best shot at power some sort of tactical agreement with small regional parties.

       The incumbent Socialists, led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, outperformed expectations, finishing with 1 million more votes than in 2019, though coming in second in this year’s more fractured results.

       The left may have the better — though still difficult — chance at cobbling together a government.

       If no one can, Spain would head to a new round of elections. It will probably take weeks or months to find out.

       Amid all the murkiness, it seems clear that Spain — which over the past five decades morphed into a bastion of progressiveness — remains resistant to the sort of far-right resurgence that has emerged in other parts of Europe and the United States.

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       When Vox formed a decade ago, it capitalized on growing Spanish nationalism in the face of Catalonia’s then-active separatist movement. It attracted extreme voters even then. But it also benefited from Spaniards fearful of losing territorial integrity.

       With a relative lull now in the independence movements, Vox has adopted an approach to politics more reminiscent of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) — targeting liberal thought wherever it may be. In one community where Vox recently won local control, it has banned nonofficial standards, including the rainbow LGBTQ+ flag, from public buildings. It wants to give parents the right to pull their children from school lessons they deem offensive and determine assigned reading. It has vowed to change local codes to do away with the term “gender-based violence,” arguing women are not the only victims and men not the only abusers. Some activists fear that could jeopardize funding for safe houses for women who experience domestic violence.

       The PP once refused to do business with Vox. But it has begun to leverage the far right in regions such as Valencia to hold back the left and enter co-governing political alliances. In doing so, it has offered concessions — allowing Vox, for instance, to push its demands to remove “ideology” from classrooms.

       Analysts cited the risk of a national PP-Vox alliance as one factor that galvanized the left and saw the Socialists fare better than expected. Voter turnout was up, at about 70 percent, compared with about 66 percent in November 2019. And this was in the middle of vacation season and a brutal heat wave.

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       “The big surprise was that the Socialist Party was three points stronger than what the polls told us,” said Pablo Simón, a noted Spanish political guru at Madrid’s Carlos III University. “Three points stronger and 1 million more votes than expected. That for me is the key that explains this result.”

       Another factor turning the tide, Simón said, could have been moderate voters who were deeply averse to the idea of a right-wing coalition including Vox. Smaller, harder-left parties also lost some ground Sunday, suggesting that Spanish voters appear to be rejecting extremes.

       “It’s possible this [threat of a government with Vox] activated voters on the left who did not go to vote in the previous elections,” Simón said. “But it’s also possible that there was a certain moderate voter who was hesitating between the PP and the Socialist Party, but who, because of this potential alliance, chose not to vote for the PP again.”

       Sánchez and his Socialists still have problems of their own. Their path to governance leads through the Catalonian pro-independence party Junts per Catalunya. But on Monday, a state public prosecutor asked a judge on the Spanish Supreme Court to issue an arrest warrant against one of the movement’s most prominent leaders and the former president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, who is being prosecuted for his participation in the organization of an illegal referendum for independence in 2017.

       Puigdemont fled to Belgium and is now a member of the European Parliament. He was recently stripped of his parliamentary immunity so he could be prosecuted. Belgium will have to proceed with the arrest warrant, though it could take months. It only adds pressure to the necessary negotiation between Sánchez and the Catalonian pro-independence political forces, who could now include a pardon among their demands.

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       On Sunday, the left-wing Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya leader Gabriel Rufián suggested Sánchez would have to choose between “Catalonia or Vox” if he wants support, suggesting the Socialists would need to grant an independence referendum in Catalonia to avoid a government that includes the far right. Few see the Socialist leader as willing to go that far — but a referendum may also be the starting point of negotiations, not an end.

       For the moment, however, the Spanish left — including one particular Madrid drag queen — is breathing a little easier.

       Vox’s losses put it below the threshold of representation needed to present legislative censures such as no-confidence votes without the aid of other parties, or launch appeals before Spain’s Constitutional Court, as it has against Spain’s abortion and transgender laws.

       “We are relieved,” Onyx said in telephone interview Monday. “Spain has spoken.”

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