Vox leader Santiago Abascal blamed PP candidate Alberto Núñez Feijóo for the “failure of the alternative,” the coalition government between the two parties he was trying to build. In a tongue-in-cheek tone, Abascal congratulated Feijóo not only on winning the elections, but also because he will not count on his party to reach La Moncloa “like he wanted”, and wondered if the PP President will now stick to his offer to the PSOE to abstain and let him govern.
Appearing without questions at his party’s headquarters, flanked by Vox leaders, Abascal attributed the fiasco to the “demobilization” of the right-wing electorate caused by the “whitening” of the socialist government caused by Núñez Feijóo’s pact offers to the PSOE, his decision not to participate in the debate with four on TVE, or the distribution of ministries ahead of the election victory. He also accused the media of “demonizing his party” and “rigging the polls,” saying that the right-wing press, with their calls for a meaningful vote, had “succeeded in wrecking the alternative.” Although he has conceded that he has not suffered the bullying of previous campaigns in this Vox campaign, he has claimed that he has suffered “more manipulation”. In any case, he said he was prepared to “both resist and repeat the elections,” and warned that Pedro Sánchez could block the inauguration of a new president or even be re-elected with greater voting weight from “communists, separatists and terrorists.”
In any case, what he hasn’t done is self-criticism, even though Vox lost 19 seats, or 36% of its seats. The decline was particularly marked in Castilla y León, the municipality where the Ultra party has governed in coalition with the PP since April 2022 and where it lost five of its six MPs, going from 16.8% to 13.7% of the vote, well below the 17.6% it had achieved in the regional elections. The blow is particularly hard because Vox had always portrayed the Castilian-Leonese government as a role model for the rest of Spain and their vice-president Juan García-Gallardo has played a particularly active role in this campaign.
Vox also lost three seats in Andalusia, two in Madrid, the Valencian Community and Castile-La Mancha, and one in Murcia, the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, Ceuta and Extremadura. In Catalonia it retains its two seats but is no longer the hegemonic force of the Spanish right as the PP doubles its votes and triples its seats. Also, in the 2019 general elections, he loses his first post that he held in Murcia and Ceuta, and the PP beat him in Almería, contrary to what happened four years ago. His consolation is that he remains the third political force, leading Sumar with two seats.
Most painful, however, was the finding that Vox will not be “crucial” as Abascal claimed, as its 33 MPs are insufficient to complete an absolute majority with the PP’s 136, so the sum of the two is insufficient to build the “alternative” to left-wing government that ultra-leader Feijóo has offered throughout the election campaign, without getting him to run the gauntlet. Vox had already expected it would not reconfirm the 52 MPs it received in the last general election, polls conducted over the past few weeks showed, even as its rallies continued to draw more publicity than those of the other parties, but it did not anticipate a fall that sharp, let alone that it would be reduced to insignificance. Since he does not reach the number of fifty deputies, Abascal does not even have the means of appealing to the Constitutional Court alone, which he has made extensive use of in the past legislature.
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Vox supporters in front of the Madrid headquarters during the check. Jaime Villanueva
After his brief appearance before the press, Abascal took to a lectern to address just over a hundred supporters who had gathered on the street where Vox’s headquarters are located. Before them he admitted to being “concerned” about the outcome of the election and told them more clearly than before the dam that it was “very likely” that the election would be repeated. “Let no one doubt that we will resist,” he proclaimed.
The morning he went to the polls, Abascal had already applied the bandage before the injury and assured that “any result that Vox achieves under these circumstances will be a heroic result”. Although Vox took part in the same televised debates as the other parties, with the exception of the PP and the PSOE, whose candidates Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo held a face-to-face interview on Antena 3; and that Abascal has refused interviews with numerous media outlets (including those of Grupo PRISA, publisher of EL PAÍS), he assured that his party “has everything against it, an opposition from the majority of the media and political opponents used in the lies, demonization and distortion of the Vox message”.
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Abascal watched the counting of votes from the top floor of headquarters, surrounded by his closest associates. The only one to show his face during those long hours was Secretary General Ignacio Garriga, who, shortly after the polls closed, made some brief statements in which he declined to comment on polling station estimates and underlined Vox’s willingness to “enforce” its votes “without giving them to the PP”. Little did he know at this point that the value of those votes would decrease in value due to insufficient votes throughout the night.
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