The PP wins and stops Vox in Castilla y León

BarcelonaThe right wing will continue to govern in Castile and León, where it has held uninterrupted power since 1987, when José María Aznar ousted the PSOE and inaugurated four decades of conservative hegemony. The president and PP candidate for re-election, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, has won the elections again, improving on the 2022 results, but falls short of an absolute majority and will not be able to govern alone as he had intended. The Castilian-Leonese leader, who is heading the People's Party list for the third time, obtained 33 seats, two more than four years ago, when he won 31. Mañueco, who has already been in power for seven years, has not been negatively impacted by his handling of the wildfires in Castile and León this summer, which led to political questioning and... the Prosecutor's Office opened an investigation against himThe president of Castile and León has managed to halt the rise of Vox and consolidate his position as one of the leading figures in the People's Party. However, the good results he has obtained are not enough to reach the 42 seats needed for an absolute majority in the 82-seat regional parliament, as he gained one seat in Segovia. Mañueco will once again depend on Vox, which only managed to add one more seat to its existing 13, halting the growth the far-right party has experienced in the other regional elections held in recent months. These are poor results for Santiago Abascal's party, which until now had seen significant growth in each election. However, unlike in Extremadura, where the People's Party's María Guardiola has placed many obstacles in the way of an agreement with Vox, to the point that new elections may be necessary, Mañueco has extended an olive branch and will now do so with an undeniable victory.

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 only broke down when Vox's national leadership demanded that all its representatives leave the regional governments in July 2024, due to the PP's acceptance of 347 unaccompanied migrant children from the Canary Islands.

The renewal of the understanding between the right and the far right, therefore, does not appear so complicated, despite the mutual recriminations and attacks during the campaignAnd even more so with the new Vox leader, Carlos Pollán, current president of the Extremadura Parliament and a first-time presidential candidate, who is more moderate and less strident than his predecessor, Juan García-Gallardo Frings.

The PSOE is weathering the storm after heavy losses in Aragon and Extremadura, where it obtained its worst results ever, losing five representatives in the former and ten in the latter. The Extremadura Socialists, who won 28 seats in 2022, have now gained two. Carlos Martínez Mínguez, mayor of Soria since 2007 and with an absolute majority for the last four terms, has managed to stem the bleeding suffered by the PSOE in recent elections. In the midst of the race towards the general elections scheduled for 2027, the results paint a more hopeful picture for the PSOE, which sees the PP and Vox enjoying large majorities in the regions where elections have been held. The Leonese People's Union (UPL), which came in fourth place with three seats in the previous elections, managed to retain them with a new candidate, Alicia Gallego, who was the only woman running for President of the Regional Government. Soria Ya, which also won three seats in 2022, being the most voted party in the province, experienced a similar situation, retaining only one representative. The other provincial party, Por Ávila (XAV), which ran with the same lead candidate, Pedro Pascual Muñoz, maintained the seat it had held since its first candidacy in 2019. Podemos and Ciudadanos lost their representation.

Podemos, which did not repeat its coalition with United Left, as it did in the previous elections, loses its single seat in the Extremadura regional parliament after failing to reach an agreement with the party, as it did in Aragon. Sumar also failed to gain representation, with results that confirm its decline at the polls. Cs also disappears definitively from all regional parliaments after winning a single seat in 2022, the only regional exception before its complete disappearance. Without the same candidate, as Francisco Igea—who became vice president of Castile and León in the 2019 legislature—was ultimately expelled from the party, Mitzin Mariana Trápaga has taken over. last regional electoral dance.