Vox is on course to double its seats, and Feijóo will need its votes to become Prime Minister

In 2023 Vox won 33 seats on 12.4% of the vote and the PP's majority hopes died with it. Three years later Vox is on 19.1% in our average and 66 seats in our projection, double its last result, and the PP's hopes depend on it.

The arithmetic of an investiture

A Spanish Prime Minister needs Congress's confidence. At the first vote that means an absolute majority, 176 yes votes. At the second, 48 hours later, it means more yes than no.

Take our current seat projection: PP 133, PSOE 113, Vox 66, ERC 10, EH Bildu 8, Frente Amplio 7, Junts 6, PNV 4, BNG 2, Coalición Canaria 1.

With Vox voting yes, Feijóo has 199 at the first attempt and is Prime Minister. With Vox abstaining, his yes votes are the PP's 133 plus, at best, Coalición Canaria's one. Against him: the PSOE, ERC, Bildu, the Frente Amplio and the BNG, 140 no votes even before Junts and the PNV decide. He loses.

So Feijóo cannot rely on Vox simply getting out of the way, as the PP hoped in 2023. On these numbers the PP would need about eight more seats before Vox's abstention could be enough, and even then only if Junts and the PNV abstained too. Vox's yes is the price of a PP government, and Abascal sets it.

What Vox wants

Vox has already shown how it uses that position. In 2022 and 2023 it went into coalition with the PP in Castilla y León, the Valencian Community, Aragón, Extremadura and Murcia, and in July 2024 it walked out of all of them in a row over the distribution of migrant minors. It is a party that is comfortable both in government and in leaving it.

This time the two parties have already done one deal. On 26 October they agreed a Senate pact under which Vox stands aside in six provinces and runs a single candidate in fourteen others, to stop the right splitting its vote in a chamber elected by a block vote (Wikipedia: 2026 Spanish general election). For Congress there is no deal, and both campaigns are behaving as rivals. Vox kept campaigning after the Urda crash while every other party stopped, and Abascal has spent the pre-campaign touring Castilla y León, Galicia, Asturias and the Balearics, where the PP's voters live.

Voters already expect the outcome. In 40dB's poll for El País, 42% said they think Vox will be part of the next government (La Voz del Sur). Asked who they want as Prime Minister, 30% chose Sánchez, 20% Feijóo and 19.8% Abascal: the Vox leader is level with the man most likely to get the job.

Where Vox's growth comes from

Sigma Dos estimates that about 960,000 people who voted PSOE in 2023 have moved right, 649,000 to the PP and 311,000 to Vox (Qué!). That is a little under a third of Vox's growth. The rest comes from the PP's own 2023 voters, from people who did not vote, and from the collapse of the smaller protest parties. In the Valencian Community, where Vox won five seats in 2023, Sociométrica, 40dB and GAD3 all give it eight of 33 (El Debate).

The PP's dilemma

Every seat Vox gains from the PP makes Vox more necessary. Every seat the PP wins back from Vox makes the right's majority no bigger, because under D'Hondt the two parties' seats largely trade with each other. That is the PP's problem in one line: it can only change who is in charge of the right, not how big the right is.

For the next eighteen days, watch the PP-Vox gap more than the PP-PSOE gap. If Vox finishes within ten points of the PP, the next Spanish government will almost certainly have Vox ministers in it.