The election campaign shifts the focus from housing to trains, and the PSOE plummets in the polls

Madrid. The sombre dismantling, at dawn on Tuesday, of the last tents set up by activists in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol reveals the frantic pace of a pre-election campaign in which the Spanish Socialists are rapidly burning through too many slogans. In the beginning, it was housing. Pedro Sánchez had called a snap election, thinking he could frame the entire debate on the back of the lingering outrage over evictions and ‘speculation’ on rents; then it emerged that his party’s spokesperson, Montse Mínguez, and her partner were major property investors, and the housing issue was dropped. The focus then shifted to pensions, raising the spectre of cuts should the right come to power; or invoking the other great national spectre, the Civil War, which is always effective in Spanish politics. Thus, the PSOE was climbing back up the polls.

Sánchez also filmed a campaign advert in front of Picasso’s famous painting depicting the Guernica massacre to tell the Spanish people that on 29 November they will have to choose between socialism and barbarism. The Central Electoral Commission has launched disciplinary proceedings against him for breaching the principles of neutrality, but political analysts note that leaders will often take calculated risks for even a modest increase in support. Sánchez’s realistic aim is not to come first, but to present himself as a credible leader against the right and perhaps revive old alliances.

This is the key to understanding the single list put forward by the left in the Senate. It includes the PSOE and the parties of the Frente Amplio coalition. Given the opinion polls, the left realised they risked handing the right (the People’s Party and Vox) three-fifths of the upper house – meaning the ability to elect four constitutional judges and strip the Socialists of their majority in the Constitutional Court. This is a particularly important battle in a country like Spain, where political conflict has long been characterised by a high degree of judicialisation. One need only think of the protracted battle over the amnesty that Sánchez granted to the Catalan secessionists in exchange for parliamentary support for the minority government formed following the 2023 election defeat.

On 28 October, however, the Urda rail disaster struck. The death toll currently stands at 69 on the same Madrid–Seville line that was the scene of another serious accident at Adamuz in January (a further 46 deaths). This has obviously thrown the electoral strategies of the PSOE and its Frente Amplio allies into disarray. The latter remain, somewhat paradoxically, loyal to the party line and the coalition, whilst calling for the resignation of the Transport Minister, the socialist Óscar Puente, and pointing to the ‘fascist-capitalist model’ as the cause of the disaster (in the words of MP Tesh Sidi, the number two in the far-left Frente, at yesterday’s press conference in Parliament).

According to the first polls carried out following the incident, the PSOE has slumped again and the People’s Party appears to be the winner almost everywhere. The figures reported by El Mundo point to a certain or likely victory for the PP in major cities and rural areas, on the coast and inland, whilst the Socialists are only managing to avoid heavier defeats in areas where local nationalist sentiment is strong enough to prevent a greater shift of votes to the right.

With around 31 per cent of the vote, the PP would not improve on its 2023 result, but could emerge as the leading political force in 36 of the country’s 50 provinces. The PSOE appears set to win only in Barcelona and Tarragona – that is, in Catalonia, home to the amnestied secessionists. Other polls published in recent days vary in detail, but not in substance. The Socialists, writes El Mundo, would lose 450,000 votes and could fall below 100 seats in the Congress of Deputies. The nightmare of the worst results in their recent history is returning – those of 2015 and 2016, both achieved under Sánchez’s leadership before he was forced to temporarily step down as party leader. Back then, the enemy was on the left and the haemorrhage of votes was bolstering Podemos. Today, after eight years of Socialist government alongside a broad spectrum of allies divided between the far left and pro-independence groups of various stripes, the provisional result leans decisively to the right. The combined total of the PP, Vox and the Navarrese conservatives (UPN) has broken through the 200-seat barrier, compared with 112 for the united left. A great deal can still happen between now and 29 November, but so far the surprises have not benefited the parties that have been in government, even when they have pretended to be in opposition.