Anticipating the date of the elections or forcing their repetition is a double-edged sword with consequences as unpredictable as the behavior of the voters themselves. Historical experience shows that, even when it seems like a winning bet, the return to the polls does not necessarily guarantee the absolute majority of the victorious bloc, as happened in 2016 to the entire center-right despite the significant advance of Rajoy's PP. The main reason for this is that the last seats that allow reaching half plus one of the Chamber are especially expensive.
Now, the outcomes generated by the two electoral repetitions recorded in Spain – June 2016 and November 2019 – reveal that these false second rounds always favor the right and weaken left-wing groups. And the same thing could happen in a hypothetical repetition of the elections of July 23.
The case of 2016 is the most obvious. The winning candidate in the December 2015 elections, Mariano Rajoy, refused to run for office because he did not have enough support. And, in turn, the second party, the PSOE, was not in a position to lead a left-wing coalition with the support of the nationalists (the famous “Frankenstein government”). For this reason, the socialists tried a center-left formula with Ciudadanos, but Sánchez's investiture failed due to the vote against popular and Podemos.
The new elections, held in June 2016, reinforced the PP, which improved its vote share by more than four points and added 14 seats (up to 137), although the simultaneous decline of Ciudadanos reduced the gains of the conservative bloc to six seats: from 163, in 2015, to 169, in 2016. At the same time, those elections frustrated Podemos's aspirations to become the leading force on the left thanks to its coalition with IU. The outcome left Unidas Podemos with 900,000 fewer votes and the same seats that both parties had gathered separately six months earlier: 71.
But the most important thing about that scenario, as would be confirmed in the motion of censure in the spring of 2018, was that the Popular and Orange parties were six seats short of the absolute majority. And when you don't have it, you have to make many and very diverse friends in the Congress of Deputies to survive. In figures, the 2016 electoral repetition reduced the turnout to the polls by more than a million voters, a number of voters similar to that lost by the entire left.
Instead, the PP increased its vote count in the 2016 meeting by more than 700,000 ballots, of which almost half a million came from the losses of Ciudadanos and UPyD. The rest came from defections suffered by the left or from an "electoral reversal": conservative voters who now did go to the polls and replaced a fraction of the UP or PSOE voters who this time stayed at home.
The 2019 election repeat is another example that the forced return to the polls usually favors the right. In that case, and despite the fact that the great beneficiary seemed to be the PSOE as the party at the head of the government, the left was unable to maintain on November 10 the participatory tension and the concentration of votes that it had registered on April 28 and lost eight seats, which moved it even further away from the absolute majority. It is true that the right also lost around 800,000 votes, but it reduced the dispersion of the vote that had occurred on 28-A and made its result more profitable. The distance between both blocks – including Navarra Suma – went from 17 to 5 seats on 10-N.
In figures, the November 2019 elections registered almost two million more abstentionists and accentuated the fragmentation of the political map: the seats of the nationalist or regionalist formations went from 37 to 41 (compared to 25 three years ago). From there, it is worth asking what would happen now if there were a failed investiture and the elections had to be repeated. And the answer, based on what happened in 2019 – and especially in 2016 – is that the right would very possibly improve its result and accentuate the tendency towards useful voting, while the left would retreat, especially on the side of Sumar. . In this way, the most likely scenario would be an absolute majority scrapped by PP and Vox (or already within reach with the participation of UPN and the Canarian Coalition).
Of course, if the evolution of the block vote were exactly the same as in 2019 – but without the fragmentation that the alternative left suffered then – the outcome would only mean for PP and Vox one or two seats less distance from the majority. absolute. And in this last case, the transfer of “useful votes” from the ultras to the popular ones would not modify the result by blocks either, since it would respond to “what is eaten is what is served.” That is to say, counting on his current partners, Alberto Núñez Feijóo would still need three more seats to win the investiture.
