Spain’s next election cycle could be the big break the right-wing Vox party has been looking for.
Latest polls and analysis are showing support has soared among the working class. The party is taking votes from the centre-left and shifting the weight of the Spanish electorate to the Right.
On this trajectory, Vox could upend Spanish politics in the next five years, according to analysts.
“If last summer, the percentage of socialist voters who claimed to have moved to [Vox] barely reached 0.3 per cent, last month it was already 2.5 per cent. And going up …” El Mundo, Spain’s second largest newspaper, said of the latest poll it commissioned, published on December 9.
That continued ascent reached almost 1.5 points more from November to December to rise to 3.9 per cent.
The poll also found that Vox is now the most popular party in cities of 100,000 or more residents. In other words, the typically working-class suburbs of Madrid and other large cities.
Other researchers have also noted the tangible shift towards Vox of a demographic that had once seemed out of its reach.
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote on his X account on December 3: “Vox begins to stand out among low-income voters. As I said some time ago, the future of Vox is in Getafe, not in the Salamanca neighbourhood. Every day it is more evident.”
Getaffe is a city just south of Madrid while the Salamanca neighbourhood is an upper class enclave in the heart of the capital, an area long identified with social-political conservatism.
“In fact, among the former ‘working class’ Vox is today the most voted party, above the PSOE and far from [left-wing coalition] Sumar or [neo-Communist] Podemos,” he added.
His findings he said came from his review of “all the national and regional surveys published in Spain in the last month, including microdata when they were available”.
Vox’s rise in polling coincides precisely with a campaign in Madrid’s southern suburbs, the area including Getafe.
The party was founded in 2013 as a breakout from the centre-right Partido Popular (PP) by former PP politician and now Vox President Santiago Abascal. It started with a clearly national-conservative platform and often emitted an upper-class, institutional persona despite its anti-establishment origins.
For years, the party’s parliamentary spokesperson was Ivan Espinoza de los Monteros, a descendant of minor nobility and a real estate developer. He and Abascal together were the face of Vox for most Spaniards.
Espinoza left the party and politics in 2023, four years after its first breakthrough into parliament.
In 2019, Vox won 54 seats in the national parliament and had wins in regional elections as well.
Since then its election results have been a mixed bag. It currently has only 33 seats in parliament and is in the opposition in all regional governments.
But a steady process of campaigning towards the working class has paid off. In fact, these latest polling results coincide precisely with Vox’s campaign in Madrid’s southern neighbourhoods including Getafe.
There, MP Carlos Quero, 34, sports a ring in his left ear, wears casual clothes and presented the party’s plan to build thousands of public housing units and stop real estate speculation by so-called “vulture funds” and foreign buyers.
The gains for Vox, though, go beyond certain suburbs.
According to Fernandez, at the moment, the PP and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) are nearly tied for votes, with 7.2 million each.
Nevertheless, because of how Spain’s electoral system works, the PP is set to win more seats in the next general elections set to take place at the latest in 2027.
Despite that, Fernandez said: “The big winner in votes is Vox, which would have already exceeded 5 million and would be around 70 seats,” regarding the next general elections.
Its strategy of wooing disillusioned voters on the Left appears to be working.
“The Left has betrayed the hope of many young people,” Carlos Quero, VOX MP said in a recent interview with ABC, referring to the rise of the neo-Communist party Podemos at the height of the great recession.
That party has seen a steady rise at the expense of the socialists, even entering into a coalition government in 2020 but has since become just another small party.
“The Left has been in power for a long time and has frustrated all the expectations generated. Those who came to denounce the [political] caste today are part of the [political] caste,” Quero said.
Today, in its place, is Vox.
Several regional elections will take place before a general one, providing the first testing ground for Vox’s real popularity. The western Spanish region bordering Portugal, Extremadura, will hold elections on December 21 – in 10 days.
