A specter haunts Spain: it is the specter of Vox. Those of Santiago Abascal wave their flag with impetus and the polls speak in their favor. In its historical series, the Center for Sociological Research (CIS) projects an almost uninterrupted upward trend for this party since 2024: if there were elections today, close to 19% of voters would vote for the radical right-wing party. For the February barometer prepared by 40db, the formation would be around an estimated vote of about 18%.
But it is not just the opinion of the polls, the fruits of their labor are reaped above all at the ballot box. It is worth remembering the results of the Aragonese elections on February 8: Vox shot up from 7 to 14 seats, obtained 60% more votes compared to the previous elections and managed to consolidate itself as the third force in the region. Above, only the bitter victory of the PP and a PSOE in free fall that lost along the way close to 18% of its electorate.
And at this point, it is worth asking, does that red brick road leave anything for Abascal's people? They boast that it does. “I have voted socialist all my life, but now I am going to join Vox.” This is how a Catalan woman addresses the party's general secretary, Ignacio Garriga, in a publication that went especially viral last year.
There are dozens of statements on social media from that disillusioned socialist. Vox is aware, boasts about it and aspires, with an eye on the recipes of its European family, to continue growing at the expense of the popular classes. With this fact on the table, it is necessary to decipher if that vote transfer is occurring or if, on the contrary, it is a kind of chimera brandished by the parties to the right of Christian democracy.
Welfare Chauvinism, the recipe for success of the European radical right
It is May 2020. A caravan of vehicles circulates through Madrid to protest against the state of alarm. Behind that mobilization there is a political actor: Vox.
The formation tries to sweep away the discontent generated by the coronavirus crisis, which especially hits the most vulnerable classes. In that “caravan for freedom”, Vox launches a video on social media named “Worker and Spanish”.
In it, several citizens who claim to be “working class” or former PSOE voters renounce their leftist past to embrace Vox. The reality is that, behind this video, there is a deeper idea. An idea that has resonated from Europe for decades and that academics baptized as welfare chauvinism, something like a strong welfare state, but only for nationals.
“The European far-right is born very much on the economic right and then has been moderating to a defense of the welfare state which has reaped greater results among the working class”. Fidel Oliván is a sociologist, political scientist, and author of 'The bull by the horns', a study that reveals programmatic differences between Vox and some parties of its European family, and which could translate into unfavorable electoral results for Abascal's party.
That welfare chauvinism boils down to a "nativist" conception -which embraces the national and rejects the foreign- of the wealth redistribution system, far from liberalism, which proposes reducing state intervention, but also far from universalist postulates.
A rhetoric, reminds Democrat for his part Tarek Jaziri, researcher of ‘More in Commons’, that managed to catapult the National Front of Marine Le Pen in France. The daughter of the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen garnered seven million votes in the 2017 presidential elections. Four years later, the one who emerged as a “femme d'etat pour la France” (stateswoman for France) obtained more than 40% of the votes in the second round of the April 2022 elections against Emmanuel Macron.
“Workers have preferences for a strong welfare state and that is where the far right tries, sometimes with this type of discourse in Europe, to attract this electorate”, explains to Demócrata Jaziri.
The Hungarian Fidesz of Viktor Orbán, Fratelli d’Italia, with Giorgia Meloni, the German AfD, the Austrian FPÖ… All reap excellent results, around 30% of the national vote, some govern and most redefined themselves in the aforementioned terms: a shift from neoliberal positions towards the defense of a State that protects the national working class against the challenges presented by a globalized economy: welfare chauvinism.
That was their recipe for success, cooked over a very slow fire and seasoned with one last ingredient: the refugee crisis in 2015. Thus, the family of Patriots, European Conservatives and Reformists reached its best moment.
The great evasion of the social democratic electorate: Greens, radical left and abstention
Its rise coincides with another point: the crisis of social democratic parties in Europe, which election after election lose sympathizers. Therefore, having reached this point, it is appropriate to dissect these leaks to check if there really is an electoral transfer with a departure flight from social democratic parties and an arrival in the radical right.
For this, we rely on the work of Abou-Chadi and Wagner: Losing the Middle Ground: The electoral decline of social democratic parties since 2000. A research that explores the crisis of these parties in the first two decades of this century and draws some conclusions about the direction their voters have taken in Europe.
Using data from national electoral studies in Austria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland, both academics draw the following conclusion: “Only a small proportion of former social democratic voters defected directly to radical right-wing parties”.
A high percentage of those defections are grouped around green parties, radical left or liberals, around 50%, and almost 30% go to mainstream right-wing parties. On the contrary, radical right-wing parties pocket marginal results from those transfers, little more than 10%.
The answer, therefore, is that that transfer does not exist in Europe, and this is confirmed by the experts consulted. Asked about this question, Tarek Jaziri speaks to Demócrata of a “myth” well-extended. “Transfers from social democracy to the far right are usually residual”, he states.
To illustrate this, the political scientist moves to Germany. The SPD of Saskia Esken and Lars Klingbeil is experiencing critical moments in electoral terms. In the 2025 federal elections, Olaf Scholz obtained 16% of the votes and lost 87 seats, the worst result for German social democracy since the Weimar Republic. The big winner of the night was Alice Weidel, at the head of the far-right Afd, which added 76 seats to its bench in the Bundestag and surpassed ten million German votes.
Were those votes old social democrats? The answer is no. In line with the study by Abou-Chadi and Wagner, Jaziri points out that the SPD electorate mainly opted for the Greens, Die Linke (The Left), the CDU or directly for abstention.
On the other side of the political board, the radical right is a beneficiary, as we have seen, of those manual workers, skilled and unskilled, attracted by discourses in defense of the welfare state. Of course, Jaziri clarifies, a right-wing profile, former voters of conservative or liberal-leaning parties. This happened with Le Pen, in France. Yes, her greatest victory was to swell her electoral base of workers. But republican workers, former sympathizers of Nicolas Sarkozy.
Vox: hunting the Spanish worker
Let's return to Spain. Although its emergence is late compared to its European counterparts, Santiago Abascal's formation surprised in April 2019 with more than two and a half million votes and 24 seats.
And despite the fact that its support grew in the following elections, in the 2023 general elections it stalled at three million votes, marking a distance from the electoral triumph of the European radical right.
Let's review the latest electoral results from a regional perspective. In Aragon, the Spanish radical right jumped from 75,000 to 117,000 votes and Pilar Alegría's PSOE lost 38,000 socialist voters. How do voters shift? The CIS pre-electoral survey offers us some clues. 70% of the electorate that voted for Vox in the previous regional elections in the region stated that they would do so again last February 18. Of the total number of young Aragonese who were not old enough to vote, 23% revealed that they would choose Santiago Abascal's ballot. More than 18% of abstainers, those who did not vote in the 2023 regional elections, would also vote for Vox.
The transfer of votes from PSOE to Vox is barely 1%. As the figure is especially low, and regional elections gather dozens of variables intrinsic to each region, it is advisable to review other studies at a national level. In the February barometer, only 3.5% of respondents who claim to have voted for the Socialist Party in the last general elections would vote for Vox if they were called to the polls today.
The figure, also on this occasion, is very residual. Vox retains 76.5% of its electorate, the national party with the highest voter loyalty. Of the electorate that could not vote, Vox garners 27.1% of those young voters. Far behind, the PSOE, with 12%. And of those who did not vote, 15% say they would vote for Vox. 10% of these voters go to the PSOE. Conversely, Vox gathers 16% of the ‘popular’ electorate, triple the number of radical right voters who would vote for Feijóo’s party in a hypothetical general election.
In Europe, the 2015 refugee crisis marked a turning point for radical right-wing parties. In Spain, it was the Catalan self-determination referendum of October 1, 2017, experts agree. However, Vox is now experiencing a resurgence thanks to an issue unrelated to territorial division: immigration has crept in as one of the main problems for Spaniards.
The party that in 2019 burst onto the Spanish political scene as the most attractive political actor for upper, middle classes and small property owners, highlights Oliván, who closely studied that first Vox, now penetrates lower-income areas “in line with the increase in immigration as the primary perceived problem”, points out the political scientist to Demócrata.
Does that mean that there is an electoral transfer in those neighborhoods? We have already seen that no. What happens is that, in parallel, “sectors of the left have been deactivated” which go to abstention, and there is another part of that abstentionist electorate or that, due to age, could not vote, which gains weight in Vox.
If we review the CIS February barometer, 12% of the socialist electorate still doesn't know who they will vote for in the next elections. In Vox, the figure drops by half and in Sumar it approaches 13%. And with a demobilized and fragmented left, and a right that gains momentum by activating new voters, there is an answer to the dilemma.
Oliván recalls that, in the field of electoral behavior, iron laws do not exist. Everything is subject to cycle changes, to invisible derivatives that only the ballot boxes reveal. His study on the Spanish radical right suggests that Vox is a deeply neoliberal party, a long way from that welfare chauvinism to which its allies in Europe pray, and that it will be difficult for it to expand its electoral base in that sense.
But in politics, those iron laws are rather of glass, and it is enough for the wind to blow in favor for that ghost of Vox, against whom all the forces of old Spain have conspired in a holy pack, to take the body it needs to enter the Moncloa Palace through the main door.