Juanma Moreno has managed to secure a comfortable victory in the Andalusian regional elections, but he has lost the absolute majority he achieved in 2022. The acting president of the Andalusian Government and PP candidate for re-election has lost five seats, and these results force him to seek allies, either in Vox as in 2019 or in María Jesús Montero’s PSOE, which has recorded its worst result in history with 28 deputies.
Read more The mess of Feijóo and Sánchez’s mistake
Moreno’s victory allows the Popular Party to consolidate its strength in a former left-wing stronghold, which is a goal of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, but it also condemns the Andalusian leader to negotiations to be invested. In this regard, it remains to be seen how he will approach the negotiation, given that he has the possibility of seeking an understanding with Vox despite having explicitly stated that he wanted to avoid the scenario of Extremadura and Aragón, but he also has the option to challenge the PSOE to abstain to facilitate his investiture.
During the electoral campaign, Moreno assured that he had no “interest” in governing with Vox if the scenario of losing the absolute majority occurred, something that was already labeled as “arrogance” by Santiago Abascal.
The acting president of the Andalusian Government and Popular Party candidate has limited himself to saying that he aims to give the autonomy “four more years of reforms, project, momentum, and stability,” without specifying how he will orient his alliances from now on. “We haven’t achieved top honors, but we have achieved excellent,” he said, acknowledging the loss of the absolute majority.
“The Andalusians have given us a clear and definitive mandate,” Moreno added, before stating that he will “fulfill the mandate” and that it “corresponds” to the PP “the responsibility to form a government.”
At the national leadership of the PP, they claim Moreno’s result because it breaks the record (previously held by Javier Arenas in the 2008 elections) and because “Sanchismo loses.” At this point, Feijóo’s team puts the results into context due to the influence that “the investiture pacts and the controversies regarding them” in Extremadura and Aragón may have had.
“Someone should do a Starmer on Sánchez,” they say at the national leadership of the PP, referring to the UK Prime Minister, who suffered an internal rebellion in the Labour Party after poor results in the British local elections. “Feijóo’s PP beats Sánchez’s PSOE by almost 20 points,” they add.
Read more Moreno is three seats short of an absolute majority with 69% of the vote counted
Moreno has obtained a total of 53 seats out of the 109 in the Andalusian Parliament and 41.5% of the vote. Despite the results, the Popular Party candidate has garnered almost 150,000 more votes than in 2022 as there was much higher turnout. In total, Moreno has reached 1,731,131 votes, with 99.64% counted.
The PP never took the absolute majority for granted and was aware that the results would be very close, but it is true that Moreno finally stayed in the lower range since almost all internal polls placed parliamentary representation between 53 and 59 seats. In any case, the entire election night was marked by caution both in Moreno and at Calle Génova, the headquarters of the national leadership of the PP.
After the results in Andalusia, the weight of Isabel Díaz Ayuso as a territorial leader increases. Ayuso, along with Alfonso Rueda (Galicia) and Gonzalo Capellán (La Rioja), are the only barons who govern with an absolute majority. Ayuso, shortly after the results were known, congratulated Moreno for “crushing the left” and stated that “Pedro Sánchez’s absolute defeat should force him to resign,” referring to Montero’s results.
In any case, the PP again exceeds 1.5 million votes in Andalusia, a figure that Feijóo already achieved in the 2023 general elections and which was the third-best result for the Popular Party in a national election (above, even, the absolute majorities of 1996 and 2011). Andalusia distributes 61 seats in the general elections, and for Feijóo it is a crucial territory (he won 25 in 2023) to govern Spain, which is why he got involved in the campaign.
Moreno’s PP has managed to win in all Andalusian provinces, although it has lost seats in Cádiz, Córdoba, Huelva, Málaga, and Sevilla.
