Andalusia: the People’s Party wins the elections in Spain’s “Ohio”. But VOX is—once again—the deciding factor

Brussels – When the citizens of Andalusia go to the polls, the whole of Spain is watching. The southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula is the most populous autonomous community in the country (9 million inhabitants, just under the population of Lombardy), home to cities such as Seville, Granada, Córdoba and Málaga and, above all, is considered a sort of “Spanish Ohio”: like the Midwestern state in the US, Andalusia has a socio-economic makeup very similar to that of the country as a whole and often the results achieved by parties at local level serve as a foretaste of what will happen in the subsequent general election.

So yesterday (17 May), with the 2027 general election in mind, the eyes of Spain’s leading political figures turned southwards: Andalusia went to the polls to elect a new regional parliament and appoint the president of the regional government. And what emerged—once again—was a confirmation of the political balance of power recorded by the key national polls: the centre-right People’s Party (PP) as the leading force, followed at a distance by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist Party (PSOE) in sharp decline, and above all the far-right party VOX acting as the kingmaker

The results: the People’s Party wins, but without VOX, they do not have a majority

With just a handful of votes remaining to be counted, the results of the Andalusian election can be considered final. The People’s Party—led by outgoing president Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla—secured 41.6 per cent of the vote, retaining its position as the leading regional party despite a slight drop from the 43.1 per cent recorded in 2022. In second place are the Socialists led by Maria Jesús Montero, who have secured only 22.7 per cent of the vote, thus achieving their worst electoral result in a region they controlled continuously from 1979 to 2018. This is a diametrically opposite trend to that recorded by VOX: confirming its position as the third-largest force in the Andalusian Parliament, the party founded by Santiago Abascal secured 13.5 per cent of the vote, thus breaking the record set in 2022. Finally, two radical left-wing and autonomist parties also cleared the electoral threshold: the anti-capitalists of Adelante Andalucía achieved a remarkable feat with 9.6 per cent of the vote (+4.6 per cent compared to 2022), while the internal rivals of Por Andalucia stopped at 6.3 per cent.

While in terms of absolute votes, the People’s Party’s victory was essentially a foregone conclusion, the real battle in the Andalusian election centred on the number of seats: would the PP manage to secure an absolute majority on its own? Or would it need to form a post-election alliance to secure the numbers required to form a new government?

It now seems clear that the correct answer is the second one. The Popular Party is expected to win only 53 seats, exactly two short of the 55 needed to secure an absolute majority. If Moreno wishes to govern, therefore, he will have to seek “outside support” from some other political force.

With the radical left and the PSOE’s traditional rivals out of the picture, the PP has only one option left: to reach out to the far-right Vox party. Moreno has not yet commented on the matter, but if this course were pursued, Andalusia would become the fourth consecutive region led by a PP-Vox coalition. The same outcome occurred following the elections in Extremadura (December 2025), in Aragon (February 2026) and in Castile and León (March 2026).

National implications: the strengthening of the PP’s right wing and the crisis within the PSOE

The struggle to secure an absolute majority and break away from VOX in order to form a government was, above all, an internal battle within the People’s Party itself. For months, a heated debate has been raging within the party over the stance to adopt in the upcoming 2027 general election and, above all, in the subsequent negotiations to form a government. The more conservative faction believes that—should the polls prove accurate and the PP emerge as the largest party but without an absolute majority—the model of regional alliances with VOX should be replicated on a national scale. The more moderate wing, on the other hand, rules out this option.

Moreno, who governed Andalusia “on his own” during the term that has just ended, is the leading figure of this second faction, and his aim was to reach the 55-seat threshold precisely to demonstrate to the PP’s national leadership that centrism pays off more than extremism and that distancing oneself from the far right attracts more support than aligning with its positions. In this, he had found the support of the party’s national leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who, during a rally in Málaga, had cryptically stated that “at this moment, it is more important than ever to have a moderate and centrist policy.”

However, the Moreno-Feijoo duo’s position has been severely weakened by the Andalusian election, to the benefit of the party’s right wing, led by the President of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso.

“We said it would be difficult, and we haven’t achieved our goal (of an absolute majority, ed.),” Moreno admitted in a victory speech that was inevitably bittersweet. At this point, the man who ran an election campaign entirely geared towards winning over the vote of centrist Spain —and even the most reformist socialists—may find himself forced to accept a series of highly controversial policy points, in order to secure VOX’s support. Among the flagship policies of the far-right party, for example, is the so-called ‘national priority’ policy. The underlying idea is that Spanish citizens should have priority over foreigners in accessing public services, regardless of the actual needs of individuals. National priority has already found its way into the government agreements reached in Extremadura and Aragon, and VOX’s presidential candidate in Andalusia, Manuel Gavira, was quick to make it clear that this is the issue on which the negotiations over the coming days will hinge: “The Andalusians have spoken clearly and have said what they want: national priority,” he warned.

While the right is locked in a dispute over how and with whom to govern, the left continues to lick its wounds. With the disappointing result in Andalusia, the PSOE has extended its run of consecutive defeats in regional elections to four and confirmed a crisis at the local level that adds to what is happening at the national level: Pedro Sánchez leads a government that no longer has a majority in Parliament and which, from 2023, will be forced to operate on a provisional budget. “The results are not good for us, and we take note of what the Andalusians have told us at the ballot box,” Montero commented immediately after the results were announced.

It was all in vain to choose her as the candidate: one of the best-known figures in the Sánchez government, having served as Deputy Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2018 until March this year.