Spain's right bloc holds poll lead as Sanchez battles to keep power

Four fresh polls put Spain's right-wing bloc ahead of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's Socialists ahead of the November 29 general election, with campaigning due to begin in four days. A SocioMetrica survey published by El Español projected roughly 200 seats in the 350-seat lower house for the conservative People's Party and the far-right Vox combined. The Socialists would take 108 seats — two more than in the previous survey — based on 5,460 online interviews with a 3 percentage point margin of error. The same poll recorded a net transfer of 832,000 voters from the left to the right.

Other pollsters see a tighter race but the same outcome. A 40dB survey for El Pais put the gap between the PP and the Socialists at two percentage points, while still giving the combined right a working majority of around 190 seats. Sigma Dos, polling for El Mundo, found the Socialists recovering some ground lost after the train crash and now likely to win 105 seats — well short of the 199 it awarded the PP and Vox. An IMOP poll for El Confidencial tracked vote transfers instead of seats, showing Socialist voter loyalty slipping and PP support rising, largely at Vox's expense.

Sanchez, in power since 2018, called the snap election on October 5 after right-wing parties voted down emergency legislation aimed at the country's housing crisis. The campaign is expected to be dominated by housing, immigration and corruption, plus the fallout from last month's deadly train crash, which forced Transport Minister Oscar Puente to resign.

A key problem for the prime minister is the weakness of his coalition partners on the hard left. They failed to agree on a common list of candidates last month, further denting his chances of holding on to power. Polls put the Broad Front on course for 10 to 15 seats, while its rival on the hard left, Podemos, risks losing its parliamentary representation altogether.