Has the Partido Popular achieved sufficient realignment with VOX to dislodge Pedro Sánchez from La Moncloa?
The president of the Partido Popular, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, met this Monday with the top brass of his party in the National Executive Committee to analyze the results of the Andalusian elections held this Sunday. And the message he conveyed to his party was unequivocal: March 17th is not just a regional victory; it is, in his opinion, the confirmation that a fundamental political change is occurring in Spain.
Feijóo maintained before his leaders that the Andalusian result “has strength for all of Spain” because, he said, “the Spanish people have responded with all accents” that they want a political change. The popular leader also claimed that the PP “wins from the opposition and from the Government” and that it does so, moreover, “with broad majorities.” A not insignificant detail: Génova avoids talking about an absolute majority, but insists on the idea of a broad social majority around the PP.
With that discourse, the popular party has practically declared the pre-campaign for the general elections open. The gigantic banner unfurled at the corner of the party's national headquarters leaves little room for interpretation. The PP believes that the political wind is blowing in their favor. The question is whether that wind is enough to turn a territorial trend into a structural change of political cycle in Spain.
Structural Realignment
Demócrata has contrasted this scenario with analysts and sociologists to answer a key question: is an ideological realignment between PP and VOX consolidating, capable of dislodging Pedro Sánchez from La Moncloa if general elections were called today?
For Eduardo Peinado, director of Strategic Words, the results of March 17th have a much greater political depth than they appear at first glance. “What happened yesterday, although bittersweet for the Andalusian PP, is a gigantic success, much greater than can be interpreted with short-sightedness and the adrenaline of an election night,” he explains to Demócrata.
In his opinion, there is indeed a realignment of the Andalusian electorate. And to support this thesis, he relies on an analysis published by Kiko Llaneras, political analyst for El País, who maintains that Andalusia has closed a cycle of four consecutive elections in which, with all possible nuances, there is a common pattern: the right always improves the result obtained in the 2023 general elections.
But, what exactly does an ideological realignment mean? And what interpretation does a Popular Party, determined to enter electoral dynamics now, draw from this?
According to Llaneras, Andalusia has become since 2018 —for the first time in its democratic history— a community more skewed to the right than Spain as a whole. And this shift has been reflected both in the general elections of 2019 and 2023 and, especially, in the regional elections. In 2022, the right won by 24 points; this Sunday it did so by 19. Even anti-system formations like Se Acabó la Fiesta managed to scratch close to 85,000 votes.
Peinado develops this idea and explains that the ideological realignment occurs when several structural factors converge: first, a political alternation after decades of hegemony —as happened with the transition from PSOE to PP in Andalusia—; then, the consolidation of a new majority ideological space —the sum of PP, Ciudadanos and Vox in 2018—; and, finally, the repetition of that majority in different electoral cycles, something that could now be crystallizing with the PP-Vox axis.
That same phenomenon, the political consultant maintains, is also beginning to be detected —though with different intensity— in Extremadura, Aragon and, in a particularly solid way, in Castilla y León. Madrid and Murcia would have previously experienced this process under the leaderships of Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón and Ramón Luis Valcárcel.
"Only 20% of simulations gave PP below the absolute majority"
Faced with that structural reading, another emerges. That of the sociologist Iñaki Urquizu introduces another demographic element that opens this range.
“In demoscopy we always speak of probabilities,” he explains to this newspaper. “With all the data from last week and more than 2,000 simulations, the probability that the PP would not achieve an absolute majority was 20%. And it has happened. That shows that everything remains very open.”
Urquizu also recalls that general elections do not behave the same as regional or municipal ones. And he gives as an example the Andalusian precedent of 2023: “Very few votes in several provinces were what allowed the majority to be maintained for the investiture of Juanma Moreno.”
The sociologist insists that the national scenario remains extraordinarily tight. He recalls that the PSOE went from 21 seats in Andalusia in the 2022 regional elections to recovering half a million votes in the 2023 general elections. And there he introduces a new decisive factor: Adelante Andalucía.
“Adelante Andalucía has announced that it will run in the general elections and has now obtained 400,000 votes. Part of the PSOE's recovery in 2023 came precisely from voters who this Sunday voted for Adelante Andalucía. If that candidacy runs, a part of those votes could return to the PSOE,” he warns.
For this reason, Urquizu refuses to close the political scenario. “Nothing is impossible at the moment. There is a great deal of equality between PP and PSOE. Vox's electorate shows certain symptoms of fatigue, but it is also true that the space to the left of the PSOE is very disarticulated. Although, as we have seen with Adelante Andalucía, it can quickly rearm itself.”
The PSOE refuses to extrapolate data
The socialist leadership clings precisely to that thesis. This Monday, the spokesperson for the Federal Executive of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, Montse Mínguez, insisted that the Andalusian result “is not a defeat for Pedro Sánchez” and argued that regional elections cannot be automatically extrapolated to general elections. Ferraz tries to focus on the PP's parliamentary dependence on Vox and avoid a national reading of the defeat.
An interpretation also shared by Sánchez's former demoscopic advisor, Iván Redondo. After the results were known, Redondo went on to assure that he sees a PSOE comeback “quite clearly” in both municipal and general elections.
Looking ahead to 2027, the consultant maintains that "the great strength of the South remains the PSOE" and considers it key to observe where that half a million mobile votes, which have historically oscillated between socialism, Andalusianism, and other left-wing platforms, will be oriented. "The relevant thing is that the left can tie," he asserts. And he adds a significant fact: while the right barely adds about 150,000 more votes than four years ago, the left-wing space has grown by around 400,000.
In this landscape, new territorial formations also appear, such as 100x100 Unidos, whose electoral behavior introduces important nuances in the reading of the results. The formation managed to win in La Línea de la Concepción, where the PP lost nearly 1,900 votes and 17 points compared to 2022. In Génova, they relativize that impact and maintain that such local behaviors penalize more in regional elections than in general elections, where the vote tends to concentrate.
"The game is open"
However, even those who observe a favorable trend for the PP, with the electoral blow of María Jesús Montero, with an unprecedented negative result, acknowledge that the scenario remains open. Eduardo Peinado considers that "the game is complicated for the left," but warns of an apparent paradox: the Andalusian result can also benefit Pedro Sánchez's strategy.
Because the big unknown now is not only how much PP and Vox grow, but how the progressive electorate reacts to the real possibility of a change in the political cycle. "This result favors the strategy of mobilizing fear of the far-right and the construction of a new political space to the left of the PSOE," he concludes.
And it is precisely there that it will be decided whether the political realignment that the PP believes it has consolidated in Andalusia, and in other communities, is the prelude to a new national majority.