PP tests 'Andalusian way' to contain Vox ahead of regional vote

Juan Manuel Moreno arrived at Sunday's Andalusian election with something his three immediate predecessors lacked: a clear path to absolute majority without needing Vox. The PP leader had spent years perfecting what he calls the "Andalusian way"—a deliberate cultivation of moderate, unruffled governance that kept ideological fire at arm's length while still governing alongside the far right when necessary. His approval rating of 5.78 on the CIS scale and voter loyalty of 83.1 percent suggested the strategy had worked. All the polls agreed: he would win decisively.

But the real test was whether Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the national PP leader, could replicate Moreno's formula at the national level. That was the calculation being made in Madrid's Génova headquarters as the party watched the south. Feijóo's numbers told a different story. He polled more than ten points below Moreno and carried a CIS approval rating of just 3.68. Only 9.9 percent of Spaniards preferred him as president, compared to 43.8 percent for Moreno. The gap was not merely statistical; it reflected a fundamental problem: what worked in Andalusia might not work in Spain.

Moreno had built his success on a precise diagnosis of his region. He had, as one analyst noted, created "several PPs"—a more liberal version for the coastal areas, a more conservative one for the interior. He had mastered the art of appearing simultaneously strong and reasonable, capable of governing with Vox while maintaining a hygienic distance from them. He almost never named them, never adopted their frames. Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the Madrid PP leader, operated in a different register entirely, thriving in cultural battles and provocative statements. On the same Thursday that Moreno posed for a photograph with a cow in Córdoba, Ayuso was defending a Mexico trip with a statement that had drawn international attention and the ire of a nation of 130 million people. Two styles, two calculations.

The question for Feijóo was whether he could become Moreno without becoming Ayuso. Political analysts saw real obstacles. Spain's geography was not Andalusia's. The PP had a gaping weakness in Catalonia and the Basque Country, where socialists had outpaced them by more than 900,000 votes in the 2023 general election—a gap that dwarfed their problems in Madrid and Andalusia. Moreover, the national media ecosystem in Madrid operated differently. Any move toward the periphery risked Vox attacking him for abandoning the center, while any embrace of Ayuso's polarization would deepen the regional problem.

Vox itself faced an unfamiliar predicament. The party had grown in Extremadura, Aragón, and Castilla y León, making itself essential to any government formation. But Andalusian polling suggested they would record their worst result of the current electoral cycle in the very region where they had first broken through in 2018. For the first time, a PP absolute majority without them appeared genuinely possible. The far-right party had discovered it had a ceiling below 20 percent in Spain—far below the strength of Europe's most potent far-right movements—and that its strategy of homogenizing messaging across regions with hand-picked leaders had limits.

The Socialist Party, meanwhile, faced the prospect of historic defeat. María Jesús Montero, the government minister running as their candidate, was polling below the party's already-dismal 2022 result of 30 seats. The decision to field sitting ministers as regional candidates had proven costly in Aragón, where Pilar Alegría had lost both votes and seats. Some within the PSOE acknowledged privately that maintaining 30 seats would constitute beating expectations. Yet party strategists clung to narrow margins for hope: roughly 15 percent of voters were still undecided with 48 hours to go, and in several provinces, the final seat would be decided by hundreds or even dozens of votes.

What hung in the balance was not merely Andalusia's government but the shape of Spanish politics itself. If Moreno won decisively—and especially if he achieved absolute majority—Feijóo would almost certainly attempt to nationalize the victory as proof that the PP's moderate path could contain Vox while offering Spaniards the stability they craved. The danger for Sánchez and the left was that a fourth consecutive PP regional victory in Spain's most populous community would crystallize a narrative: that the script for the next general election was already written, that "useful voting" against Vox meant voting PP, that the outcome was predetermined. Preventing that crystallization would require not just a respectable result but a convincing argument that the battle remained genuinely open.