The PP would revalidate victory in Castile and León but would again depend on a rising Vox
The socialists would withstand the blow unlike Extremadura and Aragon, according to the polls
BarcelonaThe president and candidate for re-election of the PP, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, would win the elections again, equaling or slightly improving his results, but would fall far short of an absolute majority and would not be able to govern alone as he intended. According to various exit polls, the Castilian-Leonese leader, who is heading the popular party's list for the third time, would obtain between 30 and 32 seats, more or less like four years ago, when he achieved 31.
Mañueco, who has been governing for seven years, has not been penalized by his management of the summer's fires in Castilla y León, which led to political questioning and that the Public Prosecutor's Office opened an investigation against him. Nevertheless, the good results he has obtained are not enough to reach the 42 required for an absolute majority in a chamber that this time has 82 representatives because one seat has been gained for Segovia.
Mañueco will once again depend on Vox, which goes from the 13 deputies it had to a range between 17 and 19 seats, confirming the growth that the far-right party has had in other regional elections held in recent months. However, unlike in Extremadura, where the popular party's María Guardiola has put many obstacles to an agreement with Santiago Abascal's party to the point that elections could be repeated, Mañueco has extended his hand.
He was the first PP leader to allow the far-right into a regional government for the first time since the beginning of democracy. And the pact was only broken when Vox's national leadership demanded all its representatives to leave the regional executives in July 2024, due to the acceptance, by the popular party, of 347 minor migrants from the Canary Islands.
The reissue of the understanding between the right and the far-right, therefore, does not seem so complicated, despite mutual recriminations and attacks during the campaign. And even more so with the new leader of Vox, Carlos Pollán, current president of the Extremadura Assembly and who was running for president for the first time, who is more moderate and less strident than his predecessor, Juan García-Gallardo Frings.
The PSOE withstands the blow after the severe setbacks in Aragón and Extremadura, where it obtained its worst results in history, losing five representatives in the first region and ten in the second. The Extremaduran socialists, who in 2022 had 28 deputies, could now remain the same or lose a maximum of four. Carlos Martínez Mínguez, mayor of Soria since 2007 and with an absolute majority for the last four terms, has managed to stop the bleeding that the PSOE has suffered in recent electoral contests. In any case, in the race towards the general elections scheduled for 2027, the results do not paint a hopeful scenario for the PSOE, which sees how PP and Vox enjoy broad majorities in the communities where elections have been held.
Unió del Poble Lleonès (UPL), which in the previous elections came in fourth place with three deputies, would manage to retain them, with a new candidate, Alicia Gallego, who was the only woman running for the Presidency of the Junta. Soria Ya, which also won three seats in 2022 and was the most voted party in the province, could lose one.
Podemos and Ciudadanos lose representation
Podemos, which was not repeating the coalition with Esquerra Unida, as happened in the previous elections, having not reached an agreement with this formation, loses the deputy it had and is left out of the Extremaduran assembly as already happened in Aragón. Sumar, on the other hand, would obtain one representative.
Cs also disappears definitively from all regional assemblies after obtaining one deputy in 2022, the regional exception before being wiped off the map. Without the same candidate because Francisco Igea – who became vice-president of Castilla y León in the 2019 legislature – ended up being expelled from the party, Mitzin Mariana Trápaga has taken over from him in what has been his last regional electoral battle. For Ávila (XAV), who was running with the same list leader, Pedro Pascual Muñoz, with the aim of maintaining at least the seat the party has had since it first ran in 2019,
