Spain’s conservative People’s Party would beat Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialists in the snap general election on November 29, but would need the right-wing Vox party to secure a parliamentary majority, according to the latest polls published this week. The new polling round is a fresh development since ReportRig’s last Spain poll post, with Vox slipping slightly and the Socialists recovering some ground.
A fresh Ateneo del Dato poll for elDiario.es, with fieldwork from November 2 to 5 and 2,000 people interviewed online, puts the Partido Popular on 31.5 percent, up 0.4 points, and the Socialists on 28.6 percent, up a point, closing to within 2.9 points. Vox is on 18.6 percent, down 1.2 points on its late-October reading and tied with Podemos for the steepest drop of any party. Across the ten polls published between November 6 and 9, Vox ranges from 17.3 percent to 19.9 percent, a simple average of 18.8 percent, against roughly 19.6 percent the week before.
A right-wing majority still looks likely
The bottom line for the right has not moved. The PP and Vox together sit on 50.1 percent in the Ateneo del Dato poll, and every pollster that projects seats still has the two parties above the 176 seats needed for an outright majority in the 350-seat Congress, at around 190 seats. A SocioMetrica poll published by El Español projected around 200 seats for the PP and Vox combined, with the Socialists on 108 seats, while a 40dB poll for El País showed the gap between the PP and the Socialists narrowing to 2 points as the latter advanced 1.8 points to 29.9 percent.
One outlier puts the Socialists ahead. La Séptima, a brand-new free-to-air channel that went live on November 5, runs a nightly SW Demoscopia tracker with a rolling sample of about 3,500 interviews, and it is the only pollster putting the PSOE ahead of the PP, 31 percent to 28.7 percent, with Vox on 17.3 percent. Leader ratings are close: Sánchez has 41 percent positive ratings, Feijóo 40.2 percent and Vox leader Santiago Abascal 38.9 percent, although Abascal has the highest share of “very bad” verdicts, at 44.6 percent.
The campaign starts on Friday
The official campaign kicks off on Friday, November 13, and polls can be published until November 23. The campaign is expected to be dominated by housing, immigration and corruption, and by reverberations from last month’s deadly train crash in Urda, which triggered the resignation of Transport Minister Óscar Puente. Sánchez dissolved parliament on October 5, nine months early, after Congress threw out two emergency housing decrees that would have suspended evictions of vulnerable tenants until 2030, capped rent rises at 2 percent and tightened the rules on short-term lets. The PP, Vox and the Catalan nationalists of Junts voted them down.
Related reading: Spain Election Poll: PP Ahead as Vox Surges Before November 29
