Conservatives get a boost ahead of the November vote as the main parties to the prime minister’s left fail to form a united ticket.
MADRID — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s chances of staging a poll-defying election comeback have suffered a serious dent.
Spain’s notoriously fragmented far left has failed to unite on a single ticket ahead of November’s election, which many Sánchez supporters had hoped would mobilize voters, capitalize on the country’s electoral system and increase the prime minister’s hopes of forming a new government.
The left-wing disarray leaves Spain’s conservative People’s Party, led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, on track to claim power after eight years of socialist rule in Madrid, as a broader tilt to the right reshapes European politics.
With negotiations stuttering, an exasperated Mónica García, health minister and candidate for the left-wing Broad Front, warned on social media that the left risked getting “trapped in egos, worries, internal disputes and electoral and/or personal calculations that are good for nobody except the right.”
The Broad Front took shape shortly after the election was called in order to bring together several parties to the left of Sánchez. But after several days of frantic discussions, prominent left-wing party Podemos did not join the united ticket — except in the Canary Islands and the Valencia region — hampering the far left’s overall electoral prospects.
“The only way for [Sánchez] to be able to govern again is for there to be a strong presence to the left of the Socialists,” said Kiko Llaneras, polling analyst for media outlet El País, who pointed out that “the Broad Front isn’t actually that broad.”
He added, “The big question is whether this new movement will be strong enough to allow the left to form a majority — and that’s going to be very difficult.”
Defying the odds
The Broad Front is made up of Sumar, the junior partner in the current Socialist-led government; the Catalan Comuns; the communist-led United Left (IU); Más Madrid; and an array of regional left-wing parties. The lead candidate of the ticket will be Ada Colau, the former mayor of Barcelona.
Spain’s electoral system rewards united platforms, and the Broad Front is not as inclusive as a similar alliance — created in 2023 and including Podemos — which helped Sánchez defy the odds and form a new administration after the last election.
Sumar, the dominant force in the 2026 alliance, has seen its vote share more than halved since 2023 to 5%, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls.
“Junior partners in any coalition tend to suffer because it’s difficult for them to implement their agenda and they tend to be less visible,” said Pablo Simón, a political scientist at Madrid’s Carlos III University.
Sumar has been lacking a high-profile figurehead. Yolanda Díaz, the labor minister and deputy prime minister who was once touted as a potential prime minister-in-waiting, is not running in the election.
The Broad Front ticket, Simón said, “is better than if there had been no agreement at all, but it’s still looking tough for them.”
Amid a last-minute scramble leading up to Friday’s midnight deadline for the registration of electoral alliances, hopes that Podemos, polling at around 3%, might join the ticket were dashed as talks ran aground over candidacies and the left-wing party’s concerns about being subsumed by the alliance.
Speaking the next day, Colau apologized to voters on the left for the lack of a deal with Podemos and, referring to the fraught negotiations, said that “if someone doesn’t want to sit down at a table, you can’t force them.”
‘We have failed’
Sánchez is banking on a solid performance by his socialists and a resurgence by Sumar and its fellow parties to prevent what most polls suggest is a virtual inevitability: The People’s Party forming a coalition government with the far-right Vox, which has enjoyed a surge thanks to its aggressive stance on immigration.
But there was further disappointment on the left last week — beyond Podemos not appearing in the Broad Front — when hopes of an even wider ticket were dashed.
Gabriel Rufián, the charismatic parliamentary spokesperson for the Catalan Republican Left (ERC), had led a debate in recent months on the need for unprecedented unity on the left going into the next election in order to prevent the far right from entering government. The prospect of Rufián, who has a strong appeal outside Catalonia, leading a joint ticket had stirred excitement among voters.
However, restricted by his own pro-independence ERC, Rufián said he would be running only for that party, ruling him out of involvement in the kind of ambitious, nationwide ticket he had raised hopes of leading.
“We have failed and, specifically, I have failed,” he said.
Juan Carlos Monedero, a co-founder of Podemos and former senior figure in the party, told POLITICO that “there is no one who has the authority to make a success of [a united left]. Rufián flirted with it, but in the end his loyalty to ERC was more important.”
Polling analyst Llaneras said that, as well as potentially mobilizing voters, greater unity would have provided a boost to the parties to the left of the socialists because of the country’s electoral framework.
“When it comes to converting votes into seats in Spain it’s very hard to do that with less than 10% of the vote,” he said. “Because the electoral districts in Spain are small, dividing the vote means losing a lot of representation. In districts where there are six or seven seats, you can miss out on all of them.”
Aitor Hernández-Morales contributed to this article.