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Four regional elections in six months have confirmed the PP’s dominance and Vox’s structural ceiling. The 100,000 votes that went nowhere in Andalusia point to something bigger.
Something significant has happened on the Spanish right over the past six months, and it has gone largely unnoticed outside the country. Between December 2025 and May 2026, Spain held four consecutive regional elections — Extremadura, Aragón, Castilla y León, and Andalusia — in a sequence that amounts to the most concentrated stress test the country’s conservative bloc has faced since the collapse of Ciudadanos. The results tell a coherent story. The PP is consolidating. Vox has hit a wall. And somewhere in the gap between them, a constituency of over a hundred thousand voters in a single region cast ballots that produced nothing.
A Cycle in Four Acts
The sequence began in Extremadura in December 2025, where the PP won with around 43% while Vox nearly doubled its seats, riding what looked like an unstoppable surge. The narrative held in Aragón in February — PP at 34.3%, Vox at 17.9%, and duplicating its seats — and peaked in Castilla y León in March, where Vox hit 18.9%, its highest-ever percentage in any election since the party’s founding in 2013. The PP won all three, but in each case needed Vox to govern. The right was winning and fragmenting simultaneously.
Then came Andalusia on 17 May, and the wave broke. The PP won 53 seats with 41.6% — two short of the absolute majority of 55 — while Vox ended at 15 seats and 13.8%, broadly where it stood in 2022. The full arc of Vox’s electoral history makes the pattern visible: 11% in the 2018 Andalusian breakthrough, a dip to 7–9% in the 2021 regionals yet a 17.6% in Castilla y León in 2022, then the winter 2025–26 regional rebound peaking at 18.9% — and now a hard brake at 13.8% in Spain’s most populous region: rise and ceiling. The shape is of a party that cannot break out of a band, though that assessment will only be confirmed if the 2027 general elections show a similar trend. For it remains to be seen if a similar pattern is followed at the national and EU level: 10% and then 15% in the two 2019 general elections and 6.2% in the 2019 EU elections, and then up to 12.4% in the 2023 general and 10.4% in the 2024 EU Parliament elections.
The explanation lies partly in voter loyalty: the share of 2022 Vox supporters in Andalusia who said they would repeat their vote stood at just 58.4% — well below the figures recorded before Extremadura (80.6%), Aragón (70.3%), and Castilla y León (69.6%), and even below the 60.2% figure from before the 2022 Andalusian election itself
The Self-Inflicted Wounds
Vox’s stall is not merely a consequence of local political culture. It is the product of a sustained accumulation of damage the party has largely inflicted on itself — and it explains something that simple arithmetic cannot: why Vox stagnates while its counterparts across Europe keep climbing.
Since 2022, Vox has conducted a rolling purge of its most recognisable figures. Parliamentary spokesperson Macarena Olona resigned in July 2022, denouncing the alleged diversion of seven million euros to the Fundación Disenso, chaired by Abascal. Congressional spokesperson Iván Espinosa de los Monteros departed in August 2023. Madrid regional leader Rocío Monasterio was removed in November 2024. Castilla y León deputy president Juan García-Gallardo quit in February 2025, calling the party a “pension plan” for its leadership. Co-founder Javier Ortega Smith — affiliate number 6, Abascal’s closest ally for years and former Secretary General of the party — was expelled from the executive committee in December 2025. After more than a decade, not one of the original founding generation remains in any position of influence except Abascal himself.
The constant internal fights, the brain drain, financial questions, and an allegedly unpatriotic foreign policy alignment explain what the French RN, Italy’s Fratelli d’Italia, the German AfD, and the Sweden Democrats have managed and Vox has not: building durable organisations broader than one leader’s inner circle. Vox has narrowed its internal tent, accumulated toxicity, and made itself dependent on foreign patrons.
The Self-Inflicted Wounds
Vox’s stall is not merely a consequence of local political culture. It is the product of a sustained accumulation of damage the party has largely inflicted on itself — and it explains something that simple arithmetic cannot: why Vox stagnates while its counterparts across Europe keep climbing.
Since 2022, Vox has conducted a rolling purge of its most recognisable figures. Parliamentary spokesperson Macarena Olona resigned in July 2022, denouncing alleged diversion of seven million euros to the Fundación Disenso, chaired by Abascal. Congressional spokesperson Iván Espinosa de los Monteros departed in August 2023. Madrid regional leader Rocío Monasterio was removed in November 2024. Castilla y León deputy president Juan García-Gallardo quit in February 2025, because of internal pressures. Co-founder Javier Ortega Smith — affiliate number 6, Abascal’s closest ally for years and former Secretary General of the party — was expelled from the executive committee in December 2025. After more than a decade, not one of the original founding generation remains in any position of influence except Abascal himself.
This internal turmoil combination — the purges, the financial questions, the institutional opacity, the abandonment of Meloni for Orbán — explains what the French RN, Italy’s Fratelli d’Italia, the German AfD and the Sweden Democrats have managed and Vox has not: steady growth through building durable organisations broader than one leader’s inner circle. Vox has narrowed its internal tent, accumulated toxicity, and made itself dependent on foreign patrons whose own fortunes have deteriorated.
The 100,000 Votes That Went Nowhere
All of that is the conventional analysis. What makes Andalusia genuinely interesting for observers of European conservative politics is a number that has received far less attention: 105,000.
That is how many Andalusians voted for Se Acabó La Fiesta (SALF or, in English, The Party is Over), the anti-establishment movement built around MEP Luis “Alvise” Pérez, on Sunday — 2.53% of the total, zero seats. Under Andalusia’s provincial D’Hondt system, the vote was spread too thinly across eight constituencies to clear the threshold anywhere, despite the party having gathered 181,000 Andalusian votes in the 2024 European elections. The regional pattern is consistent: roughly 17,000 votes in Aragón (2.74%, zero seats), 15,933 in Castilla y León (1.4%, zero seats), and now 105,000 in Andalusia. In every case, no representation. In Aragón, SALF came within a thousand votes of a seat. In Andalusia, those 105,000 votes directly cost Vox three deputies — one each in Jaén, Córdoba and Málaga — where the split between the two right-wing forces left Abascal’s candidates narrowly short in the final provincial counts.
The short-term reading is that these are wasted votes that damage the right. The more important reading is structural. A movement that mobilises over 100,000 votes in a single region with minimal media access, no regional infrastructure, no public funding, persistent legal harassment of its founder, and a leader whose primary platform is a Telegram channel with over 700,000 subscribers is not describing a protest vote. It is describing a latent constituency. The voters who stayed with SALF under intense tactical pressure to consolidate are not primarily driven by cultural conservatism. They are anti-establishment, economically insecure, digitally mobilised, and hostile to both the PP’s accommodation with the existing institutional order and Vox’s record in — and out of — government. They are politically homeless in a way no current Spanish party is genuinely addressing.
The honest assessment of SALF itself is that it is unlikely to be the vehicle that captures this potential. Its organisation is skeletal, its candidate pipeline thin, its founder legally embattled and already abandoned by two of his three MEPs. SALF is the raw material for a political force, not the force itself.
That raw material is sitting there, and much more from unmobilised voters, and also some pockets of voters coming from PP and Vox. The question of who picks it up — with serious infrastructure, regional roots, a credible anti-corruption programme, and leadership that does not depend on one man’s social media reach — is one of the more interesting open questions in Spanish politics heading into the 2027 general election. And given what we know about the “reluctant PP voter” backing Moreno primarily on governability grounds, and the “reluctant Vox voter” backing Abascal in the absence of something more compelling, the true latent demand is almost certainly larger than the 105,000 who expressed it on Sunday.
This is where the ECR group, and its allies in Spain should be looking. The niche is real, it is documented, and it is currently unoccupied by any force with the credibility and structure to convert it into durable political representation. ECR’s model — national sovereignty without the authoritarian baggage, economic reform without foreign financial dependence, conservative values without the self-defeating purge culture — is precisely what this constituency is searching for, even if it does not yet have the language to say so. Spain is not without ECR representation — MEPs Diego Solier and Nora Junco have been building that bridge since Vox’s departure from the group in 2024 — but a parliamentary foothold needs a domestic political force behind it to mean anything.
One hundred thousand votes in Andalusia, converted into nothing. The question is what happens when someone provides the structure to turn that nothing into something.