Pedro Sánchez did not wait long after the parliamentary defeat that brought down his government’s two housing decrees. On Monday, October 5, the Spanish prime minister formally called an early general election for November 29, ending several weeks of uncertainty over whether his minority government could continue passing major legislation through Congress.
The immediate blow came on Friday, when parliament rejected the two housing decrees with the votes of the People’s Party, the PP, Vox and Junts. The government had introduced the measures after a series of protests linked to Spain’s housing crisis, initially intensified by the eviction of an 87-year-old woman in Madrid before demonstrations spread, including to Puerta del Sol.
Sánchez’s decision to return to the ballot box therefore comes at a moment when the polls are not particularly comfortable for the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, the PSOE, although they do not give the People’s Party enough of a lead to regard the election as settled before the campaign has even begun.
The latest 40dB poll, published Monday by El País and Cadena SER, puts the PP first with 31.6% of voting intentions, compared with 27.4% for the PSOE. The gap is 4.2 percentage points. That is a meaningful lead, but not one that by itself determines an election, particularly in Spain, where votes are converted into parliamentary seats through constituencies rather than by applying a simple nationwide proportional calculation.
What stands out in the figures is not only the PP’s lead, but Vox’s position. The radical-right party reaches 18.4%, up six-tenths of a point from the previous poll, while the PP falls by eight-tenths and the PSOE by two-tenths. The movement on the right is therefore not benefiting the leading party alone. Some voters are moving further toward Vox.
Belén Barreiro, director of 40dB, describes the right’s advantage as clear while warning against treating the election as already decided. The poll also suggests that the movement of some PP voters toward Vox is connected, among other issues, to immigration.
On the other side of the political divide, the problem goes beyond the distance between the PP and PSOE. The poll gives Sumar 5.6%, Podemos 2.7% and the newly created “Se Acabó la Fiesta” around 2%. The political space to the left of the PSOE therefore appears increasingly fragmented at a moment when Sánchez needs those votes to turn his electoral strength among progressive voters into parliamentary seats.
Podemos’s figure is particularly relevant. At 2.7%, the party remains close to the 3% threshold that can become decisive in some of Spain’s larger constituencies, although the conditions for winning representation differ from one constituency to another. Sumar, meanwhile, enters this phase considerably weaker than it was in the 2023 election. The parties and groups occupying that political space have already begun working on a new alliance around a “Frente Amplio” project, with details and a candidate still to be announced in October.
There is also a timing issue that matters when reading the 40dB numbers. The fieldwork was conducted between September 25 and 28. The poll therefore captures public opinion after the housing protests had begun, but before Friday’s parliamentary defeat and before Sánchez announced the early election.
It does not measure the electorate’s reaction to Friday’s vote in Congress, nor to the prime minister’s decision on October 5.
The survey is based on 2,000 online interviews and describes the mood of the electorate at a particular moment rather than predicting the result of an election several weeks away. Even so, the direction is clear: the PP is first, the PSOE second, Vox is in an increasingly strong position, and the smaller parties that Sánchez may need remain divided among several political labels.
A Winston Research poll published by Artículo14 on October 4 goes further by translating voting intentions into projected seats. It gives the PP 31.3% and 135 seats, compared with 24.9% and 102 seats for the PSOE. Vox reaches 19.1% and 69 seats. Sumar is projected to win 10 seats and Podemos four, while other parties would take 30 seats.
Under that projection, the PP and Vox would together hold 204 seats, 28 more than the absolute majority threshold of 176 in Spain’s 350-member Congress of Deputies.
That projection nevertheless has to remain what it is: a simulation based on a poll, not an electoral map already drawn. National vote shares do not automatically translate into seats, and the geographical distribution of votes can substantially alter the final result. The differences between Spanish polling organisations are also still wide enough to make any claim of a settled outcome premature.
The picture is different again in the polling conducted by Spain’s Centre for Sociological Research, the CIS, a public institution. Its latest available barometer, based on 4,042 interviews conducted between September 1 and 4, gave the PSOE 31%, compared with 25.5% for the PP and 16.6% for Vox. The public institution therefore still placed the Socialists first, with a 5.5-point lead.
The difference between that picture and the one offered by the private polls in October is not merely technical. It reflects a difference in timing, different methodologies and a rapidly changing political environment around housing, immigration and the government’s increasingly difficult relationship with its parliamentary partners.
The housing crisis itself may still alter the trajectory. Recent demonstrations have pushed the issue to the centre of the political debate, but the 40dB survey did not yet record a major shift in voting intentions attributable to those protests. Its fieldwork ended before Congress rejected the two government decrees.
Immigration occupies a different place in the political equation. The CIS barometer conducted in early September came after the migration crisis in Ceuta at the end of July and recorded Vox at 16.6%. But the figures alone do not establish that Vox’s rise was caused directly by Ceuta or by Morocco. What can be established is that immigration is one of the issues through which Vox is seeking to expand its electoral base.
The same CIS barometer also found that 86.3% of Spaniards considered cooperation with Rabat important or very important for securing the country’s borders. That figure makes it even harder to reduce changes in the Spanish political landscape to a single episode or a single issue.
Three different electoral pictures therefore coexist in Spain today. The CIS still places the PSOE first. The most recent private polls put the PP ahead. And some seat projections give the PP and Vox a comfortable parliamentary majority.
What changes today is that these figures are no longer simply hypothetical answers to the question of what might happen if Spaniards voted now. The election is now set for November 29. The campaign will officially begin on November 13, while political parties are expected to submit their candidate lists between October 21 and 26. At the same time, the forces on the left have already begun discussing how to reorganise themselves.
Sánchez therefore enters the race with a PSOE that retains a substantial electoral base and whose 40dB gap with the PP is not an insurmountable one. But he also faces a more structural problem: even if the Socialists remain the largest force on the left, the weakening of Sumar and Podemos could make it harder to convert progressive votes into parliamentary seats.
The PP, meanwhile, does not necessarily need to defeat the PSOE by a wide margin to become the strongest candidate to form the next government if Vox maintains its current level of support. The 204 seats projected for the two parties by Winston represent the clearest version of that scenario. They remain, however, a polling scenario rather than an election result.
The election announced by Sánchez on Monday therefore begins from an equilibrium that is still open: a People’s Party leading several recent private polls, Socialists still capable of remaining in contention, Vox approaching one voter in five in some surveys, and a left that has yet to find the formula capable of preventing fragmented votes from becoming lost seats.
Whether the housing crisis will alter this trajectory, or whether immigration, identity and security will continue to carry greater weight in shaping voters’ choices, cannot be settled by polls conducted before the election was announced. That answer will begin to emerge once the campaign enters its real phase and the question becomes less theoretical for Spanish voters: who will govern Spain after November 29?
