Spain Votes on November 29 After a Housing Defeat, and Polls Put PP and Vox Above a Majority
Pedro Sánchez did not have to call this election. Spain’s next general election was due no later than August 2027. He called it anyway, on October 5, three days after Congress threw out his government’s two emergency housing decrees. Junts, the Catalan party his minority government depended on, voted with the People’s Party (PP) and Vox to kill them. Sánchez answered by dissolving parliament and setting the vote for Sunday November 29, the earliest date the law allowed.
His bet is simple. Housing is the issue Spaniards are angriest about, with rents still climbing, protest camps in several cities and pot-banging demonstrations across the country. If the campaign is about who will fix housing, the Socialists (PSOE) think the left can recover. If it is about Sánchez himself, after eight years in office, the right expects to win.
As of November 11, the polls say the right is winning.
What the polls show
Almost every private poll has the same order: PP first, PSOE second, Vox third and clearly above its 2023 result. A running average of 16 pollsters compiled by The Rio Times puts the PP at about 32 percent, the PSOE at 26, Vox at 19 and the left alliance around Sumar at 6. Translated into seats, the PP and Vox together land at roughly 200 of the 350 in Congress. A majority is 176. In 2023 the two parties won 170 between them and Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the PP leader, fell short of the premiership despite finishing first.
The exceptions are worth noting. The state pollster CIS showed the PSOE ahead in its barometers earlier this year, and its numbers have long been criticised by the right as too kind to the government. An internal Vox poll published by The Objective on November 1 also put the PSOE narrowly first, but still gave the right a majority. Prediction markets are blunter. Traders on Polymarket gave Feijóo about an 83 percent chance of becoming prime minister in late October.
The campaign so far
The campaign was knocked off course on November 2, when two high-speed trains collided near Urda in Toledo province. The next day Transport Minister Óscar Puente resigned and said he would not stand in the election. Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo is overseeing the ministry in the meantime. Puente had been one of the government’s most combative voices, and a rail disaster under his watch hands the opposition a ready line on how the state is run.
Sánchez has said he will reissue the housing decrees that Congress rejected, which keeps the issue in front of voters. Feijóo has framed the vote as a chance for Spain to be rid of Sánchez. Vox, led by Santiago Abascal, is campaigning to be more than a supporting act.
What a PP and Vox majority would mean
The arithmetic matters more than the vote share. If the PP cannot govern alone, it will need Vox, either as a coalition partner or as an outside supporter. A coalition would put a far-right party into Spain’s national government for the first time since the end of the Franco dictatorship.
For the European Union the change would show up in migration, climate and the budget debates rather than in the big alignments. The PP sits in the European People’s Party and has not wavered on Ukraine or NATO. It would, though, give Brussels one more large member state whose government depends on a nationalist party, alongside Italy and others.
For Sánchez, defeat would likely end a career built on surviving bad odds. He won in 2023 by losing the popular vote and assembling a majority from regional and left parties. That coalition is what broke on housing in October. The question on November 29 is whether housing anger is strong enough to rebuild it.
See our September case against the Sánchez government, written before the election was called.