Vox: Rise to Becoming Spain’s Third Most Supported Political Party

Editorial 07/23/2023 Updated at 18:16 CEST

Vox was the third most voted formation in the general elections of November 10, 2019. The formation, founded at the end of 2013 in response to the shift towards the center of Mariano Rajoy’s PP, arrived at the elections after playing a very active role against the Catalan independence process throughout throughout 2017 and 2018, which, together with the public support of prominent figures in Spanish society such as the bullfighter Morante de la Puebla or the writer Sánchez Dragó, provided notoriety to the young party led by Santiago Abascal. He had previously had very moderate success, such as in the 2015 general elections, in which he obtained 57,753 votes, 0.23% of the total, and fell far short of winning a seat. In 2016 it even got worse, gathering 46,781 votes.

The first serious warning of the formation came in the Andalusian elections of 2018. In them, Vox won 12 seats and almost 11% of support, being the Spanish version of the far-right wave that was beginning to become very palpable throughout Europe. This step was endorsed by the general elections of April 2019, in which Abascal’s party improved its result by 5597.3%, attracting up to 2,688,092 voters and winning 24 seats. Although it did not win any senators, the emergence of the greens on the political scene was now undeniable.

And, if its appearance in April had been notable, it could still improve. The November elections gave another boost to Vox, which grew to 3,656,979 votes (36% more than in April) and soared in seats, going from 24 to 52 and becoming the third most supported political force in the country. Furthermore, he set foot in the Senate, obtaining two senators. Its emergence, on the other hand, became a problem for the Popular Party, which saw how the green party ‘stealed’ its support, and, above all, for Ciudadanos, which disbanded from then on (it fell from 57 seats from April to November 10) until practically disappearing from the political spectrum.

By province, Madrid was the one that contributed the most deputies to Abascal’s deputies, with 7. They got 3 in Valencia, Alicante and Murcia, and 2 in Barcelona, ​​Seville, Málaga, Cádiz, the Balearic Islands, Almería and Toledo. They also achieved a seat in Las Palmas, Asturias, Granada, Tenerife, Zaragoza, Badajoz, Córdoba, Cantabria, Castellón, Ciudad Real, Huelva, Jaén, Valladolid, Albacete, Cáceres, León, Salamanca, Guadalajara, Segovia, Zamora, Ávila and Ceuta . In the rest of the constituencies they did not have representation.

Regarding the results for the Senate, Vox was harmed by the distribution system used in Spain, since, although it was the fifth most voted party, with 3,229,631 supports, it only obtained 2 senators, the same result as Teruel exists! with just 57,340 votes, for example, while ERC, with 3,040,779, took 11. However, there were bloodier cases, such as that of the Podemos-IU coalition, which did not obtain any senator despite its almost six million votes, or Ciudadanos, which was close to five million but also did not achieve representation in the Upper House.

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