Spain will go to the polls for the third time in under four years on 28 April after the country’s Socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez called a snap election.

• This is the third general election in three-and-a-half years.
• The size of the Spanish electorate is almost 35 million voters, 1.2 million of whom live abroad.
• Opinion polls estimate that outgoing Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez will win but his Socialist Party won’t get a majority .
• The big novelty of these elections is the emergence of far right in the form of the Vox party. Since the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, Spain had been one of the few European countries with no far-right party to speak of.
• A year-and-a-half after a failed independence bid in the north-eastern region of Catalonia shook Spain and Europe, the issue remains at the heart of Spanish politics.
• Under Spain’s proportional ‘closed’ list voting system, instead of putting a cross next a name, voters choose between lists of candidates put forward by their parties.

The top candidates:

PEDRO SANCHEZ, 47, SOCIALIST WORKERS’ PARTY (PSOE). He has focused his campaign on trying to rally left-wing voters against the possibility of seeing the far-right Vox in government, but also on women’s rights.

PABLO CASADO, 37, PEOPLE’S PARTY (PP). He has led an aggressive campaign against the Socialist leader’s approach to pro-independence parties in Catalonia. He has taken a hard line in the campaign on family values and euthanasia.

ALBERT RIVERA, 39, CIUDADANOS (CITIZENS). Founded Ciudadanos in 2006, a pro-European party originally from Catalonia which jumped to the national scene in 2015. Strongly opposes making any concession to Catalan nationalists and has made it one of the main points of his campaign.

PABLO IGLESIAS, 40, UNIDAS PODEMOS (TOGETHER WE CAN). Iglesias founded Podemos in 2014 with colleagues of the Complutense University, as part of the anti-austerity protest movement in Spain. Polls show Podemos losing support from the last election, mainly due to internal disputes. Was crucial with it’s support for Sanchez’s minority Socialist government.

SANTIAGO ABASCAL, 42, VOX. Vox is the newcomer on the Spanish political scene. The party founded in late 2013 by former PP members. The campaign was dominated by the pledge to “make Spain great again” and anti-immigration rhetoric.