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According to polls published on Monday – the latest to be distributed – the PP will be the party with the most votes, with around 38 to 39 seats ahead, followed by BNG (22-25) and PSOE (10-14) . .
The seats of Vox and Podemos are almost impossible and Sumar's entry into the Galician parliament also seems difficult. Yolanda Díaz's party has around 3% of the vote in several provinces, but Galicia's electoral system requires overcoming a high hurdle – 5% – and that limits its options. According to my calculations, the party's chance of being represented is less than 10%. The exception among the small forces is the Democracia Ourensana (DO), which has to win a seat in Ourense.
Who has the opportunity to govern?
The first question on Sunday is whether the People's Party will achieve 38 seats in order to govern alone with an absolute majority. As the graphic shows, the situation is quite tense:
The four private polls (Sondaxe, GAD3, Sigma Dos and 40dB.) have a PP with 38 or more seats as their central scenario. They consider this majority to be more likely than the alternatives, although with nuances. Sigma Two puts the PP at 39-41, while the latest poll is at 40 dB. This left 36-40 seats for EL PAÍS and Cadena SER, meaning the possibility of missing out. The poll that stands out the most from the rest is again the CIS, which estimates the PP in a range of between 34 and 38 seats, with few options for a majority.
Can we translate this into probabilities?
For this I created one of our prediction models. As I explain in the methodology at the end, I conducted an average of five polls and then simulated the elections 20,000 times, introducing normal errors into the polls.
There are three main possible outcomes: 1) that the PP has an absolute majority; 2) that the majority comes from BNG and PSOE; 3) that Democracia Ourensana has the decisive seat to give power to one bloc or another. The graphic shows your probabilities:
In 69% of cases, the PP alone will have the majority. That's how often it reaches 38 places in my simulations. (I've also listed Vox's seats here, in the very unlikely event that he wins them.)
In another 25% of simulations (1 in 4) there will be a majority of the left BNG and PSOE. (I've also listed Podemos and Sumar's seats here, in the unlikely event they win them.)
In the remaining 6% of simulations, Democracia Ourensana has the decisive seat. Neither the PP nor the sum of BNG and PSOE reach 38 seats, and the small party shifts power to one side or the other.
Remember that the numbers above are probabilities: those that are most likely to happen, according to current polls and their historical accuracy. The model essentially says that a PP majority is the most likely outcome, even if this is only the case in two out of three cases. Your victory is as easy or difficult as seeing a penalty kick during a penalty shootout. The possibilities for a surprise are 1 in 3… such as rolling a die and getting a five or a six.
Another way to look at it is to imagine a tree of alternatives. The numbers above indicate how many of 100 possible futures the PP wins, how many the left wins and how many Ourensana Democracy decides. What we don't know is which of these futures will be ours.
Finally, I calculated these probabilities using each pollster's estimate as a starting point rather than the average votes from five polls. In one extreme case, the Sigma Dos and GAD3 data increase the PP options to a majority probability of 80%. In the other, the CIS appears again. As has been the case since 2018, their estimate for the left is more favorable: BNG and PSOE together get 51.5% of the vote and the PP does not get beyond 42.2%. This means that if his estimate is taken into account without further precautions, the People's Party would hardly have a 20 percent chance of a majority and the likely outcome would be a BNG-PSOE government.
Methodology. Our calculation of seats is based on a three-stage process: 1) We start from the average number of votes estimated in the five private polls – with PP (46%), BNG (29.7%), PSOE (16.2%), Sumar (2.9%), Vox (2.3%), DO (0.65%) and Podemos (0.6%) –; 2) We estimate the number of votes in each province using this average; 3) We take into account the uncertainty of the polls, taking into account their historical precision; and 4) we simulate 20,000 elections, varying the votes in each election and distributing seats according to D'Hondt. A more detailed version of our methodology can be found in the description of the general election model.
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