The result of the polarized elections of 23-J has a historical reading that reflects the profound political changes that Spain has undergone in the last decade. These changes are summarized in a noticeable shift to the right of the electorate that condemns the left to a subordinate position or to a tie in votes with the conservative bloc as the highest realistic aspiration. In other words, Spain has ceased to be a center-left country, whose hegemony was expressed in the more than 12 million votes that the PSOE and IU were able to gather in 1996, 2004 or 2008.
For its part, the right (PP, UPyD and Ciudadanos) totaled in 2008 –the year of the maximum display of bipartisanship– slightly more than 10 and a half million votes. This result was registered after the popular ones managed to redeem themselves from the lies of 11-M, which had cost them the loss of power and more than half a million ballots in the 2004 elections.
As of 2008, the conservative block –although with new brands such as Vox– has never fallen below ten and a half million votes (its worst result in November 2019), while it reached its peak in 2011 ( with 12 million ballots between the PP and UPyD). But on June 23, the right wing fell short of that record with almost 800,000 votes. (See graphics).
In turn, the left has never repeated the 12.3 million votes of 2008 either. The closest it has come (just over half a million votes away) was in the 2015 elections, an authentic expression of punishment at the polls against the cuts and corruption of the main force of the right (although thanks to the votes of Ciudadanos, the conservative space was still then above its 2008 floor).
However, in the elections eight years ago, the left concurred divided into three offers: an aging PSOE and still marked by Rodríguez Zapatero’s adjustment policy; an emerging alternative left that embodied Podemos, and the traditional IU. And the electoral system was in charge of converting its advantage of one million votes over the center and the right into a smaller number of seats (161 compared to 163).
The repetition of the elections in 2016 left almost two million ballots to the left of its 2008 ceiling. Two-thirds of those losses went to abstention, but the rest, some 600,000 voters, supported the right. Instead, the following elections –in 2019 and already with the PSOE in power– gave the progressive bloc 11.3 million votes. That result – the best in the last seven years for the left – was, however, a setback of one million voters compared to their records of 1996 or 2008. And as a result, the right signed a tie on ballots , although he was still quite far from his unpublished result of 2011.
From there, and if one takes into account that on July 23 the leftist forces added less than 11 million votes (one and a half million below their historical ceiling), the question is inevitable: what happened to majority left? And the answer seems to be found in the changing behavior of almost two million voters since 2008, the moment of maximum expansion of the bipartisanship.
Of course, it is not in all cases the same voters as 15 years ago, since the generational change alone has meant the entry into the census of more than six million new voters and the departure of almost four million. But election results from 2016 suggest that nearly 700,000 former left-wing voters now fall in the conservative space.
And the rest of the losses on the left? As already noted, 23-J left the progressive bloc one and a half million ballots below its historical ceiling. Discounting those that have landed in the conservative bloc, there would still be almost a million voters to be awarded, but they would be distributed among the abstention (now much higher than in April 2019) and some minority formations.
In short, the Spanish scene is home to almost two million of what could be considered wandering voters. And in them lies the key to the outcome. Around 700,000 seem to have definitely moved from the left to the right, although they do not always vote: they did not do so in November 2019, but almost all of them did on 23-J. The rest, up to more than a million voters since the 2016 elections, seem to have steadily submerged in abstention, although more than half a million reappeared in the ranks of the left in April 2019 to give victory to Sánchez. On the other hand, on 23-J almost a million of them missed the appointment with the polls again. And, for this reason, unlike April 2019, the PP-Vox bloc gathered more votes on July 23 than the PSOE and Sumar.
However, even if the errant voters sunk in abstention and who were previously located on the left returned to their place of origin to the point of forcing –as in 2019– a tie in votes with the right (or even a slight advantage). , the electoral system and the abduction of Ciudadanos by the PP would condemn the PSOE and Sumar to continue reaping less or, at most, a similar number of seats than the conservative parties. In other words, the government options of the Spanish progressive bloc inevitably go through an entente with the peripheral nationalists (even if the errant voters of the right chose to abstain, as they did in November 2019).
