Feijóo would win the Moncloa and Abascal the elections
Alberto Núñez Feijóo could reach the Moncloa on November 29th without having achieved hegemony within the Spanish right. This is the paradox indicated by the YouGov poll for ARA: the Popular Party could win the government while Santiago Abascal wins the political battle. The PP would be the leading force, but would lose seats. Vox, on the other hand, would stage a spectacular growth and become essential to govern. Feijóo could achieve the change in power without asserting his hegemony. And the difference is fundamental: it is one thing to occupy power and another to determine its direction and dominate the discourse.
The figures are quite eloquent. The PP would go from 137 seats in 2023 to 120, a loss of 17 seats, while Vox would jump from 33 to 72, an increase of 39. Together they would total 192 seats, 16 above the absolute majority. The PP would obtain 29.6% of the votes, but Vox would reach 20%, a historic result for the Spanish extreme right. The sum guarantees, on paper, the possibility of governing; the distribution of the seats explains who would emerge strengthened from the polls. For every seat that Feijóo would lose, Abascal would gain more than two.
Even more significant is the circulation of votes between the two parties. Vox would capture 16% of the 2023 Popular voters, more than 1.3 million people, while the PP would recover 12% of the extreme right's voters, about 360,000. The net balance of this exchange would approach 940,000 votes in favor of Abascal.
We are not just facing a weakening of Pedro Sánchez's government, but a turn to the right and a redistribution of power within the right itself. A very significant part of this electorate prefers a more radical right and one without the complexes it attributes to the Popular Party.
Feijóo arrived at the presidency of the PP with the implicit promise of recovering a right wing capable of governing, but he has assumed that his path to the Moncloa necessarily passes through Abascal. And he has not done so against the will of his voters. According to the poll, 82% of conservative voters approve of Vox's entry into a PP government and only 11% oppose it. The alliance with the far right has ceased to be an inconvenience to become a normalized form of government. The debate is no longer whether the PP will make a pact with Vox, but rather what political price they will make them pay for the presidency. This is Abascal's deepest victory. An eventual change of government would not simply be an alternation between socialists and conservatives, but the entry of Vox into the definition of State policies.
The left faces this scenario with evident wear and tear. The PSOE would remain at 105 deputies and the Broad Front would drop to 19, while Podemos could disappear from Congress. The government's rating, a 3.3 out of 10, makes it difficult to trust that the latest social announcements alone will reverse the trend. Almost 30% of former Sumar voters would move towards the PSOE, but the concentration of the vote on the left does not seem sufficient to prevent the retreat of the whole. Sánchez can still mobilize his political space, but the poll says he fails to build an alternative parliamentary majority.
Catalonia, left-wing with a far-right pushing
Catalonia presents a different picture, but confirms the growth of the far right. Progressive forces would retain 33 of the 48 deputies, with an ERC that would advance from 7 to 13 seats and a PSC that would fall from 19 to 16. Junts would regress from 7 to 4, while the PP would lose one seat, from 6 to 5, and Vox would triple its representation, from 2 to 6. The non-participation of Aliança Catalana could favor Abascal, but it is not yet possible to quantify this effect. The result would strengthen Junqueras and Rufián, would punish Junts' strategy and would leave the independence movement facing a new reality: an absolute majority for the PP and Vox would liquidate its political capacity in Congress.
There are two weeks of campaigning left, but there is a trend that deserves more attention than the simple possibility of a change at the Moncloa. The PP could win the elections while losing strength, while Vox could lose them in number of votes and win them in political influence. Feijóo aspires to end Sánchez's era, but Abascal aspires to something more lasting: to transform the Spanish right and convert its positions into the new common sense of power. If the forecast is confirmed, Feijóo will have the keys to the Moncloa. The question is how many he will have had to hand over to Abascal to be able to enter.
The ballot boxes have yet to be filled, but the forecasts point to the collapse of one Spain and the eruption of another.
