Can the right add more than 12 million votes? The answer is yes. More than a decade ago, the Popular Party and Rosa Díez's UPyD gathered exactly that figure, which represented almost 50% of the valid votes. In parallel, can the left collapse to the point of reaping around 10 and a half million ballots? And, once again, the answer is also affirmative: in the 2011 elections, the Socialists and the United Left added less than nine million voters.
However, as the 2011 electoral date already belongs to a too remote past, the reference must be more recent. And even so, the answer remains affirmative: in the general elections of 2016 and November 2019 (both with a 66% turnout), the PSOE and the different formations to its left even fell below 10 and a half million. of votes.
Well then: only with such an extreme correlation in absolute vote, popular and ultras could aspire to add between 175 and 178 seats (which, with a participation of 72%, similar to that of April 2019, would mean more than 46% of the ballots for the block made up of PP, Vox and Ciudadanos, and a maximum of 41% for the left). And the aforementioned count of seats is born from projecting that vote estimate in the 52 constituencies of Spain based on the territorial distribution of the suffrage of each party.
However, the first problem with this estimate is that it gives the whole of the conservative space (32% of the votes for the PP, 14% for Vox and 1% for Cs) a contingent of ballots that goes far beyond what it supposes the transfer of votes in favor of the Popular Party that the polls reflect. The high range of this transfer would place the PP close to 31% -ten points more than in 2019-, Vox around 12% -three points less- and Cs below 2% -five points less.
Now, in this last case, the conservative bloc would hardly caress the 170 deputies. And in this sense, it must not be forgotten that in the 2016 elections, when PP and Ciudadanos gathered 46% of the votes (and more than 11 million ballots), the harvest of seats for the center and right bloc remained in 169 deputies (seven away from the absolute majority in Congress). Hence, the motion of censure that, in the spring of 2018, brought Pedro Sánchez to the presidency could go ahead.
The second problem with a vote correlation that brings the conservative block closer to twelve million ballots is that this space has never registered a similar result in the most recent elections (and when it did, in the 2011 elections, it was in a context of decomposition of the PSOE suffrage due to the harsh policy of adjustments applied by the socialist Rodríguez Zapatero). The closest that PP, Vox and Cs have been to a vote of this magnitude (11,325,000 ballots) was in the April 2019 elections, the most participatory (in almost two million more voters) of the five general elections held since November 2011.
Consequently, the third problem with an estimate that brings the right closer to an absolute majority is that it must be accompanied by a certain catastrophe on the left, which would reduce its space to little more than 40% of the votes. It is a plausible vote quota, of course, if the formations of this sign are limited to mobilizing together the ten million voters of November 2019. Now, everything that is not that scenario, leaves the PP and Vox far from the 176 essential seats to govern.
For example, if the Popular Party were to gain 90% of the Cs vote and scratch two more points at the expense of the left and the regionalists (which would take the popular to 29% of the vote) and if, in addition, Vox maintained its 2019 result (more than 15% of the ballots), the total count of seats for the conservative bloc would not go much further than 168 deputies. At least, this would happen in the event that the PSOE did not fall below 27% of the vote and Yolanda Díaz's project managed to unite in a single brand the majority of the electorate of Unidas Podemos, Más País and the peripheral lefts (until add 14%; that is, even fewer votes than in the November 2019 appointment).
Now, if the ideological spaces remained watertight (with the same level of mobilization as that of April 2019), and the rise of the PP had to be nourished almost exclusively by the losses of Vox and the death of Ciudadanos (with a distribution of almost 30% of the votes for the popular, 13% for the ultras and less than 1% for Cs), then the computation of deputies from the conservative bloc would fall below 160. In this case, the PSOE votes (28%) and the alternative left of Yolanda Díaz (15%) would translate into more than 150 deputies and both forces would even be in a position to repeat the majority of the investiture with Esquerra, PNV and Bildu.
The advantage of this last scenario is that it would be manageable. On the other hand, any other in which the electoral uprising of the right (always with Vox as a dance partner) did not result in an absolute majority (or in more than 170 seats that would make it possible to reach it with some regionalist formations) would be practically ungovernable: a Parliament blocked. And that is precisely the scenario that emerges from projecting in each province the transfer of votes in favor of the Popular Party that, for now, draw the majority of polls: 166 deputies for the conservative bloc and 145 for the left.
In short, the polls outline the electoral horizon, but the most likely outcome is to follow the path that marks the possible vote in each provincial constituency.
