Let’s start with the big drawing before the blue tsunami metaphor wears off. With this election the recomposition of the right is culminated and, Ciudadanos collapsed, the PP becomes its forceful leader. Given their poor performance in 2019, this growth was taken for granted, but they have exceeded expectations. If the right and the left are usually tied around eight million votes, this time the first bloc has widened by 600,000 votes, of which seven million are from the conservative party. The PP has become the list with the most votes in more than half of the autonomous communities at stake, which it will be able to govern. Impossible a better balance of institutional power.

For its part, the PSOE has yielded 200,000 votes compared to 2019 and obtains 750,000 fewer votes than the PP. It has not had the same dynamics everywhere: it grows in Catalonia, resists in Aragon and the Balearic Islands and weakens in Murcia or Extremadura. On the contrary, the space to its left has had a more forceful retreat. As it happened in 2019, it shrinks again and disperses inefficiently to gain representation. Only Más Madrid is consolidated, but it is a poor balance against a Compromís that passes to the opposition and a damaged Podemos. In any case, the institutional balance for the left could not be more bleak. The Socialists will barely retain the governments of Asturias, Navarra and Castilla-La Mancha. If Americans speak of swing states to refer to the territories where they dance, practically all of them have done so to the right wing.

In these elections there was a structural advantage for the right. The PP grew at the expense of Cs and could rely on its partner on the right, Vox, which was going to improve between three and nine points. On the contrary, although the electoral dynamics of the PSOE could be more nuanced, its partners (left and regionalists) were weaker, with which it was going to be more difficult to add alliances. But there has been something else. The right block has expanded and has mobilized much more, it seems that because of the nationalization of these elections. The management of the left in autonomies and municipalities has a much better evaluation than that of the Government and, nevertheless, all the focus has been placed on the latter. Moncloa has not prevented these elections from being a plebiscite on the President of the Government.

This last key is decisive to understand why the regional and local elections point to a trend for the general ones. The PP has penetrated Andalusia to the absolute levels of Moreno Bonilla, and the PSOE has a difficult time compensating for this setback with Catalonia. The right devastates institutional power, and Vox is already consolidated. And it is true, there is no automatic translation between the two elections. However, this difference between blocks prefigures that PP and Vox already caress a government majority. Once the generals have been summoned, Sánchez trusts everything to mobilize the left to prevent them from doing so. At the moment, in the first round, he is behind.