Exactly one month before the elections in Andalusia, Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s PP continues to close the gap with Pedro Sánchez’s PSOE. The Center for Sociological Research (CIS) May barometer shows an increase in voting intentions for the referendum and for Vox, while support for the left bloc has stagnated. The PSOE would win today’s elections with 30.3% of the vote, the same percentage as a month ago, but the PP is just 1.6 points behind the Socialists, with a 28.7% intention. Vox is also growing, jumping to 16.6%, the highest voting intention in the CIS since at least November 2019. On the other hand, the slump in support for United We Can continues (the minimum since the last general election) and continues the downward trend of Ciudadanos.
The barometer was carried out on the basis of 3,865 interviews between May 3rd and 12th, amid the Pegasus espionage scandal that led to the sacking of Paz Esteban as head of the CNI and with the Andalusian elections already scheduled but awaiting an agreement of the Block of numerous parties to the left of the PSOE in the municipality. The Socialists would win the elections, but it is slipping behind the PP, whose voting intentions have already skyrocketed in the previous CIS because they reflected the impact of the PP Congress, which confirmed Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s rise to the helm of the party .
The PP achieves a voting intention of 28.7%, up another point and a half, on top of the 6.1 points it already added in the previous barometer. It also shows that Vox is catching up on what it lost in the previous poll, a decline attributed to the Feijóo effect on right-wing voters. Santiago Abascal’s rises to 16.6%, its historic maximum since the 2019 general elections (it reached 16.3% in March).
Whether or not to follow the dissensions among the Andalusian left, together we can prolong and exacerbate their fall. If Vox equals his record, Ione Belarra’s formation will stand on the opposite side. It falls again, now to 9.6% of voting intentions, down 1.1 points from April and the lowest support since November 2019 elections, when it hit 12.9% of the vote. With that, the bloc of PP and Vox, the current partners of the government in Castilla y León, adds 45.3% of the voting intention compared to 39.9% accumulated by the Socialists and those of Podemos. Meanwhile, Ciudadanos continues its steady decline, falling to 1.8%.
The second vice president, Yolanda Díaz, is the only politician among the leaders surveyed to get a paltry 5.05 in agreement. However, the approval Feijóo received in the previous poll (the first in the CIS to ask citizens to rate him) was short-lived. He fails: he goes up from 5.2 to 4.86, although he has better grades than Pedro Sánchez (4.28).
What affects most is what happens next. Subscribe so you don’t miss anything.
Subscribe to
The CIS barometer for April already showed that the PP’s voting intention had risen to 27.2%, up almost four points from March, while pointing to a rebalancing between left and right blocs. Last month’s study collated the effect on citizens of the PP Congress, which confirmed the rise of Alberto Núñez Feijóo to the party’s leadership, but did not reflect the impact of the inauguration of Alfonso Fernández Mañueco as President of Castilla y León’s alliance with Vox .
This poll has already pointed out that the sum of PP and Vox, the model tested in Castilla y León, would add 41.6 of the votes, while the PSOE and United We Can coalition ruling in Spain remains at 40% vote ( the poll does not provide a projection of seats in Congress).
The Social Democrats fell 1.2 points in April from March to position themselves as the winner of a possible general election with 30.3% vote intent. For its part, United We Can fell 1.1 points to 10.7%, the formation’s worst since July of last year. For his part, Ciudadanos had been falling in the CIS since February, and last April was credited with just 2% support, even under the coalition of more country-equo and compromís.
The fieldwork of the May Barometer, usually based on almost 4,000 telephone interviews, was carried out after the call for autonomous elections in Andalusia became known and in the midst of a political storm due to the Pegasus case: initially due to the denunciation of an alleged mass espionage by politicians who were the advocating independence, and later by the government’s announcement that the President had also been spied on in 2021. However, they do not include the effects of the audios of corruption in Spain recorded by Commissioner Villarejo and revealed by EL PAÍS.