Spain voted today in an election that has produced a result simultaneously clear and inconclusive. Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s conservative People’s Party has emerged as the largest force in parliament, defeating Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s governing Socialists in both votes and seats. Yet Spain does not directly elect a prime minister, and the PP appears unlikely to possess enough parliamentary support to govern comfortably even with the right-wing Vox party. Sánchez has finished second but may still have a route towards remaining prime minister if he can reconstruct a sufficiently broad parliamentary coalition. The immediate temptation is therefore to ask which leader actually won, but Spain’s electoral system makes that question less straightforward than it sounds.
In a presidential election, finishing first can provide a relatively clear answer because voters are directly selecting the executive. Spain is a parliamentary democracy. Citizens elect the 350-member Congress of Deputies, and a government subsequently needs enough parliamentary support to survive an investiture vote. The relevant democratic question is therefore not simply which party receives the most seats, but which candidate can assemble enough representatives to command the confidence of parliament. A party can finish first and remain in opposition while a second-place party governs through coalition. That outcome may feel counterintuitive, but it is not inherently undemocratic because the parliamentary majority itself is also produced by voters.
This distinction becomes important whenever politicians describe themselves as possessing a singular “mandate”. Feijóo can legitimately argue that Spanish voters made the PP the country’s largest party and substantially increased its representation. Sánchez can equally argue that a majority of voters elected parties that may be willing to prevent a PP-led government. Neither fact automatically overrides the other. Elections produce several pieces of information simultaneously, and parliamentary systems require politicians to translate those pieces into a governing coalition.
The difficulty is that voters choose parties before knowing exactly which bargains those parties will make afterwards. A Socialist voter may support Sánchez’s economic or social policies without wanting concessions to Catalan separatist parties. A regional nationalist voter may strongly oppose the PP while remaining sceptical of other elements of Sánchez’s programme. Coalition government combines those preferences into an arrangement that no individual voter selected in its entirety. That can make post-election bargaining appear less democratic than the election itself, even though bargaining is part of how proportional representation is designed to work.
This is the recurring trade-off between representation and decisiveness. Electoral systems that translate votes relatively proportionally into seats allow several political identities to obtain parliamentary representation, but they make single-party majorities less common. Systems that manufacture clearer majorities can produce more decisive governments while leaving more voters without representation corresponding closely to their preferences. Spain has chosen a system in which coalition-building is increasingly unavoidable, particularly as the old two-party dominance of the PP and PSOE has fragmented.
The rise of Vox illustrates how that fragmentation has changed Spanish politics. The party entered national politics as a major force on the right, combining Spanish nationalism with strong positions on immigration, regional separatism and social policy. Feijóo’s PP therefore faces a strategic dilemma similar to centre-right parties elsewhere in Europe: cooperating with a party further to the right may provide the parliamentary arithmetic required for government while simultaneously alienating moderate voters whose support is also necessary.
The election suggests this problem is real. The PP gained substantially, but Vox lost seats compared with 2019, and the combined right has not obviously secured the majority many expected. Sánchez had campaigned partly by warning that a PP government dependent on Vox could reverse progressive legislation and intensify conflict over social and territorial issues. Even voters dissatisfied with Sánchez may therefore have supported parties on the left because they preferred him to the alternative coalition.
Again, elections are comparative rather than absolute judgements. A voter can dislike the government and still vote to preserve it because they dislike the opposition more. This is the same mechanism visible in the American midterms and Turkey. Government dissatisfaction creates an opportunity for opposition; it does not automatically create an opposition majority.
Spain’s regional parties make the coalition problem even more complicated because political competition occurs along both ideological and territorial dimensions. Catalan, Basque and other regional parties may support a national government not because they agree with its entire left-right programme but because they expect concessions on autonomy, language, investment or constitutional questions. A national election therefore becomes a negotiation between different conceptions of Spain itself.
This is particularly sensitive after the 2017 Catalan independence crisis, when the Catalan government organised an independence referendum that Spanish courts had declared illegal and Madrid subsequently imposed direct rule after Catalonia’s parliament declared independence. The crisis demonstrated how quickly territorial disagreement can become constitutional confrontation when different institutions claim competing forms of democratic legitimacy.
Sánchez subsequently pursued a more conciliatory approach, including pardons for several Catalan separatist leaders convicted over the events surrounding 2017 and reforms affecting sedition law. Supporters argue that reducing legal confrontation helped lower political tensions in Catalonia. Critics accuse Sánchez of making concessions because he needed regional parties to sustain his parliamentary majority. Both interpretations can contain truth because policies can simultaneously serve a substantive political objective and improve coalition arithmetic.
This is why coalition bargaining raises questions about pivotal minorities. A small regional party may receive only a fraction of the national vote but become decisive if neither major bloc can reach a majority without it. Its bargaining power therefore becomes much larger than its national electoral share might suggest. Critics describe this as disproportionate influence; defenders point out that the party’s leverage exists only because larger parties failed to win enough seats themselves.
The mechanism resembles the nationalist voters who became pivotal between rounds of Turkey’s presidential election. Political influence depends not only on size but on position. A group with ten seats that neither coalition needs has little leverage. The same ten seats become enormously valuable when both blocs are ten seats short of a majority.
This is marginal political power. The decisive voter is not necessarily the average voter but the voter capable of changing the outcome.
Coalition systems therefore create incentives for parties to target pivotal groups, just as markets assign higher prices to scarce resources. That can produce policy compromises disproportionate to population size, but it can also force national governments to incorporate territorial minorities that might otherwise remain politically marginalised.
Spain’s challenge is deciding when accommodation strengthens the state and when it encourages increasingly large demands from parties whose support governments need. If regional parties know they can extract concessions whenever national elections produce fragmented parliaments, they have incentives to increase their demands. National parties then face criticism from voters elsewhere who believe territorial minorities receive excessive influence.
The result can become a federal bargaining problem without a fully federal constitutional structure. Spain is highly decentralised through its autonomous communities but constitutionally remains one state whose territorial arrangements are politically contested. Coalition arithmetic repeatedly brings that unresolved constitutional question into ordinary government formation.
This is one reason Sánchez has become such a polarising figure. His supporters view him as unusually adaptable, capable of constructing parliamentary majorities across a fragmented political landscape and reducing confrontation in Catalonia. Opponents view the same adaptability as opportunism, arguing that he compromises institutional principles whenever doing so keeps him in office.
The behaviour is similar.
The normative interpretation differs.
This is the same question Mark Rutte’s coalition collapse raised two weeks ago: when does compromise become betrayal? Parliamentary politics cannot function without concessions, but political leaders need enough ideological consistency that voters can predict what their ballot means. A politician willing to bargain over everything may be exceptionally effective at obtaining office while weakening the informational value of elections.
The best safeguard is transparency. If Sánchez attempts to construct another coalition, voters should know what concessions each party demands and what programme the resulting government intends to implement. Coalition agreements convert elite bargaining into something citizens can evaluate rather than leaving government formation entirely inside private negotiations.
Feijóo faces the same standard. If the PP seeks Vox’s support, the important question is not simply whether cooperation with Vox is morally acceptable in the abstract but which policies the PP would concede in exchange for parliamentary votes. Coalition partners should be judged according to the actual institutional bargain they construct.
This is why describing an entire coalition through its most controversial member can sometimes mislead. A small party can influence government without controlling it. The relevant question is how much influence the larger party gives it and over which policies.
The election also demonstrates the limitations of the largest-party principle. Feijóo may argue that democratic convention should allow the party finishing first to govern. That principle has intuitive appeal because otherwise voters can feel the winner has been denied office through post-election manoeuvring. Yet Spain’s constitution does not award government automatically to the largest party because parliamentary legitimacy comes from majority confidence.
Suppose the PP receives 33% of votes and every other party representing 67% explicitly opposes a PP government. Allowing the PP to govern solely because it is the largest single organisation would actually give plurality greater weight than majority preference. The opposite problem appears when the anti-PP majority consists of parties with almost nothing in common except opposition to the PP.
Neither arithmetic produces a perfect mandate.
This is why parliamentary democracy should be understood as coalition construction rather than winner identification. The election distributes bargaining power. Government formation determines which combination of that power can sustain an executive.
That process is less emotionally satisfying than declaring one winner on election night, but it may represent a fragmented electorate more accurately.
Spain’s result also says something about European politics more broadly. Predictions of an inevitable rightward wave across Europe should be treated cautiously. Right-wing populist and nationalist parties have grown significantly in several countries, including Italy, Sweden and Finland, but their performance varies substantially according to national institutions, candidate quality and coalition structures.
Political trends are real without being deterministic.
Vox’s losses tonight do not mean nationalist politics has disappeared from Spain. The party remains significant. They demonstrate that political movements can reach ceilings as well as floors, particularly when moderate voters begin considering the consequences of bringing them into government.
Coalition expectations therefore influence voting before coalitions even exist. A voter may support the PP in isolation but hesitate if they believe voting PP makes a PP-Vox government more likely. Another may support the Socialists reluctantly because they want to prevent that coalition.
This creates anticipatory coalition voting. Citizens are not merely selecting their preferred party. They are estimating the government their vote might help construct.
Proportional representation therefore demands more strategic reasoning from voters than the simple instruction “choose your favourite party” suggests.
The economic context matters too. Spain has performed better than some European economies expected after the pandemic, while inflation has fallen from its peaks and employment has improved. Sánchez’s government also implemented labour-market reforms and expanded social policies. Opposition criticism has focused on public debt, taxation and the political concessions required to maintain the governing coalition.
The election therefore was not occurring against an obvious economic collapse that would make government defeat inevitable. Once again, political outcomes depend on multidimensional comparisons rather than one macroeconomic indicator.
Spain’s institutional resilience may ultimately be the more important story. The election was deeply polarised, regional tensions remain unresolved and government formation may become extremely difficult. Yet nobody needs to know tonight who the next prime minister will be for the constitutional system to continue functioning.
Parliament will be constituted.
Parties will negotiate.
The king will nominate a candidate after consultations.
The Congress will vote on investiture.
If nobody can construct a government, constitutional procedures provide routes towards another election.
Uncertainty exists inside the rules.
That is very different from uncertainty about the rules themselves.
This distinction between political uncertainty and institutional uncertainty may be one of the most useful measures of democratic stability. Political uncertainty is healthy: we do not know who will govern because voters genuinely possess choices. Institutional uncertainty is dangerous: we do not know whether the loser will accept the result or whether constitutional procedures will continue.
Spain currently has plenty of the first.
There is little reason tonight to assume the second.
That means the coming bargaining may look messy without representing democratic failure. Parties will make uncomfortable compromises, smaller groups may obtain disproportionate leverage and voters may dislike the eventual coalition.
The alternative would be pretending Spain contains a coherent majority that today’s election simply did not produce.
It does not.
The PP came first.
That matters.
It does not settle who governs.
In a parliamentary democracy, voters choose the parliament first and the parliament chooses who can survive inside it. Spain’s election therefore has a winner in seats without yet having a winner in power.
Those are different victories.
The next few weeks will determine whether anyone can turn one into the other.
