Bringing forward the date of the elections or forcing them to be repeated 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 for the center-right group, despite the significant advance of the Popular Party of Mariano Rajoy. The main reason for this is that the last seats that allow you to get half plus one of the Chamber are particularly expensive.
Now, the outcomes that have caused the two electoral repeats that have been registered in Spain - the one in June 2016 and the one in November 2019 - reveal that these false second rounds always favor the right and weaken the left groups. And the same thing could happen in a hypothetical repeat of the July 23 elections
The case of 2016 is the most obvious. The winning candidate in the December 2015 elections, Mariano Rajoy, gave up running for the investiture because he did not have enough supporters. 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 centre-left formula with Citizens, but the investiture of Pedro Sánchez failed due to the vote against the Popular and Podemos.
The new elections, held in June 2016, strengthened the PP, which improved its vote share by more than four points and won 14 seats (up to 137), but the simultaneous retreat of Ciudadanos reduced the gains of the conservative bloc in six seats: from 163, in 2015, to 169, in 2016. At the same time, these elections frustrated the aspirations of Podemos to become the first force of the left thanks to the coalition with IU. The outcome left Unides Podemos with 900,000 votes less and the same seats that both formations had gathered separately six months earlier: 71.
But the most important thing about this scenario, as it would be verified in the motion of no confidence in the spring of 2018, was that the popular and the oranges were six seats short of reaching an absolute majority. And when you don't have an absolute majority, you have to make a lot of friends in the Congress of Deputies to survive. In numbers, the repeat election of 2016 reduced turnout at the polls by more than a million voters, a similar number of voters that misled the entire left. Instead, the PP increased the vote count to more than 700,000 ballots, of which almost half a million came from the losses of Ciutadans and UPyD. The rest came from the desertions suffered by the left or from an "electoral reversal": conservative voters who this time did go to the polls and replaced a fraction of UP or PSOE voters who this time they stayed at home
The 2019 repeat election is another example that the forced return to the polls usually favors the right. In this case, and despite the fact that the major 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 vote concentration that it had recorded on November 28 April and lost eight seats, which took it even further away from an absolute majority. It is true that the right also yielded nearly 800,000 votes, but it reduced the dispersion of the vote that had suffered in 28-A and made the result more profitable. The distance between both blocs – including Navarra Suma – went from 17 to 5 seats on 10-N.
In numbers, the November 2019 elections recorded almost two million more abstentionists and accentuated the fragmentation of the political map: the seats of nationalist or regionalist formations went from 37 to 41 (compared to 25 three years earlier) . From here, you have to ask yourself what would happen now if there was a failed investiture and the elections had to be repeated. And the answer, based on what happened in 2019 - and, above all, in 2016 - is that the right would very possibly improve the result and accentuate the tendency towards the useful vote, 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 the PP and Vox (or already within reach with the UPN and Coalició Canària contest).
Make it clear that if the evolution of the bloc vote were exactly the same as in 2019 – but without the fragmentation that the alternative left then suffered –, the outcome would only mean for the PP and Vox one or two less seats compared to the absolute majority. And in the latter case, the transfer of "useful votes" from the ultras to the popular ones would not change the result by blocks either, since it would correspond to "so much paid, so much served". In other words, with his current partners, Alberto Núñez Feijóo would still need three more seats to win the investiture.
