This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Spain’s socialist PSOE party has vowed to outlaw prostitution in a series of measures designed to appeal to female voters ahead of the general election on 28 April, according to reports.

With polls suggesting women make up as much as half of the 40% of undecided voters, the party, led by the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has published a female-friendly manifesto. It contrasts with claims by some rightwing parties that so-called “feminazis” are discriminating against men.

Although it did not appear in the manifesto published on Monday, PSOE sources told El País that, under pressure from feminist groups, an updated document would assert that “prostitution, which we aim to abolish, is one of the cruellest aspects of the feminisation of poverty and one of the worst forms of violence against women”.

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The party also proposes to clamp down on surrogacy agencies, which it says “undermine the rights of women, in particular the most vulnerable, by treating their bodies and reproductive functions as merchandise”. The issue has on occasion been a source of friction between some feminist and LGBT groups.

The manifesto also promises to introduce equal parental leave, of 16 weeks, for men and women, and to revise the sexual offences law to make the issue of positive consent – yes means yes – the deciding factor.

Meanwhile, Spain’s rightwing parties have tried to appeal to men who they say are being undermined by feminism. In last December’s regional elections in Andalucía, Javier Ortega Smith, the secretary general of the far-right Vox party, demanded that gender violence laws be scrapped, claiming they discriminated against men.

Santiago Abascal, Vox’s leader, called for an end to subsidies going to what he called “radical feminist groups” and the scrapping of the gender violence law in favour of a new law against “family violence that protects the elderly, men, women and children equally”.

Pablo Casado, the leader of the conservative People’s party, provoked an outcry among some Spanish women when he appealed to traditional Catholic voters, declaring: “Women should know that what they carry inside them is another life.”

“Thanks for clearing that up, Pablo,” one woman tweeted. “I thought I was carrying a Kinder egg.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vox party’s leader, Santiago Abascal, said he wanted to scrap Spain’s gender violence law and replace it with one that protected men and women ‘equally’. Photograph: César Manso/AFP/Getty Images

Justifying his party’s refusal to support the international women’s day march on 8 March, in which hundreds of thousands of women took part, Casado said it was designed “to provoke a confrontation between men and women and to divide them”.

Albert Rivera, the leader of the centre-right Citizens party, advised the Podemos party leader, Pablo Iglesias, who recently became the father of twins, that “sometimes you have to pretend to be asleep to avoid changing nappies”.

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The PSOE pledge to abolish prostitution would require a change in the law as, while pimping and trafficking are illegal in Spain, prostitution is not.

There are an estimated 100,000 sex workers in Spain, in a trade worth around €3.5bn (£3bn) a year. Police and NGOs estimate around 80% of sex workers have been trafficked.

Surveys suggest around 39% of Spanish men have paid for sex, a far higher proportion than in the majority of European countries.