Far-right Vox Seats Nearly Double, Spain's Left-Wing Government Faces End

【Madrid dispatch】Less than two months before Spain's snap election on November 29, Al Jazeera, citing a poll by the mainstream center-left newspaper El País, reported that if the conservative People's Party and far-right Vox were to combine, they would win 198 parliamentary seats, exceeding the 176-seat threshold needed to form a government. This means one of the few governments in Europe still led by the left — the Socialist Party government led by Pedro Sánchez — could be coming to an end.

According to a poll by Spain's national broadcaster RTVE, Vox is the only party showing significant gains in this election, with seats projected to jump from 33 in 2023 to 65, nearly doubling. By contrast, Sánchez's Socialist Party is projected to win only 112 seats, a further decline from the 121 seats won in the previous election; the People's Party's approval rating has largely stagnated.

Eight years ago, Vox was still a marginal small party on the Spanish political scene, but today it shares power with the People's Party in four regional governments and roughly 100 municipal councils. Should the two parties formally establish a joint government, this would mark the first time the far right returns to the core of Spanish state power since the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. Vox national spokesperson José Antonio Fúster told Al Jazeera: "Spain sees hope in these elections. We will fight to win, to convince Spaniards that we deserve their votes." But he also warned the People's Party against repeating the 2023 mistake — "distributing ministerial positions before winning the election."

What is driving this political upheaval is not a single factor, but the convergence of multiple crises.

The first is the housing crisis. According to Al Jazeera, 87-year-old Madrid resident María del Carmen Avascalor — known as "Maricarmen" — was evicted from the apartment where she had resided for 70 years, an incident that sparked public outrage; protesters set up encampments in central Madrid and other cities, triggering a wave of nationwide protests; she died this month while the protests continued. After the government's two bills to protect tenants from eviction were rejected in parliament, hundreds of thousands took to the streets. Sánchez then gambled on a snap election, attempting to turn the housing issue into a political chip.

However, the root of the housing crisis is not simply a matter of insufficient supply. Sánchez personally told the media that it is a "seriously dysfunctional market" caused by "rampant speculation" that "does not operate according to supply and demand logic" — meaning that financialization and speculative capital have turned housing from a right to dwell into an investment good. People's Party leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo, meanwhile, pledged to build 200,000 housing units per year and cut taxes, but did not address the structural root of land and financial speculation.

Deeper pressure comes from corruption scandals. Al Jazeera reported that corruption controversies involving members of Sánchez's family, criticism of his handling of the Ceuta immigration crisis, and the amnesty decree for 2017 Catalan separatists have all weakened the Socialist Party's governing base. After Sánchez announced the snap election, Feijóo told the media: "This is an election between corruption and decency, between decline and prosperity, between a government that only seeks to preserve itself and a country that thinks about the future." Al Jazeera noted that this framing deliberately casts the People's Party as an "anti-corruption" force, while sidestepping the policy direction the party has long pursued in housing marketization and the allocation of public resources.

Anti-immigration sentiment has become the core mobilizing tool for the far right. Alberto Muñios, a 24-year-old Barcelona programmer wearing the red-and-gold wristband of a Vox supporter, told Al Jazeera: "What I really hate [about Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez] is how keen he is on letting more immigrants into our country." Steven Forti, a contemporary history lecturer at the Autonomous University of Barcelona who specializes in the far right, analyzed to Al Jazeera that Vox, like other far-right parties in Europe and Latin America, keeps its distance from the Franco dictatorship but employs "dog-whistle politics" — making no explicit references to the dictatorship. Vox leader Santiago Abascal has claimed in parliament that the Sánchez government is "the worst in the past 80 years," implicitly suggesting the dictatorship era was better.

Whether Sánchez's gamble will pay off remains unclear. Even before the election was announced, the Socialist Party had been trailing in nearly all polls for months, with most voters saying they would support the People's Party and Vox. Al Jazeera noted that if the election results confirm the polls, Spain would become, after France, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Finland, yet another European country where the far right has made significant gains — the overall rightward shift of Europe's political landscape means that structural problems such as the housing crisis are being masked by immigration fears and cultural nationalism, while those who truly bear the cost are evicted tenants and market-driven young people.