SEVILLE, Spain — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez officially launched his long-shot reelection bid in Seville on Thursday, appealing to Socialist loyalists in Andalusia, the southern region that for decades served as his party’s political heartland.

But even here, the center-left is now is on the ropes — in a stark sign of how improbable a Sánchez win now looks on Nov. 29.

Surrounded by Socialist supporters waving red party banners and Andalusian flags and shouting “¡Guapo!” — “Handsome!” — the undaunted prime minister took the stage in Seville, dancing to the upbeat strains of a romantic pop song, chosen to underscore his progressive message of love in the face of the politics of hate.

“We’re here to vote, we’re here to win, we’re here to govern,” Sánchez told the adoring crowd, which had been shown videos of the prime minister reciting poems by Federico García Lorca, the celebrated Andalusian poet and playwright murdered by Francoist forces in 1936.

Sánchez’s decision to launch his campaign in Seville is laden with historic symbolism. For 36 years, the Socialists dominated Andalusian politics, controlling the regional government and many of the region’s biggest cities. 

That hold on power ended in 2018, after years of declining support and a string of corruption scandals paved the way for the center-right People’s Party to take control.

Since becoming regional president in 2019, Juanma Moreno has established himself as a steady, pragmatic leader, winning a landslide victory in 2022 and securing the most votes in snap elections earlier this year. His success in Andalusia has also elevated his profile nationally, making him one of the leading figures of the PP’s moderate wing.

Despite the PP’s consolidation of power in Andalusia, the Socialists are not ready to relinquish their claim on the region. Francisco Toscano, a Socialist candidate for congress in Seville, told POLITICO the party still considered Andalusia to be its bastion.

“This is an eminently progressive region, and one whose voters believe in progressive government,” he said.

Electorally, he added, Andalusia is crucial to the Socialists’ grander ambitions. “This is the most populous autonomous community in Spain, so its weight at the national level is very important,” he continued, noting that the region elects the largest number of lawmakers to the parliament in Madrid, making up 60 of the 350 seats.

But while Sánchez’s campaign launch struck an optimistic note about the prospect of an Andalusian comeback, the latest polling suggests the Socialists could suffer disastrous results across the region.

According to the latest GAD3 poll, the center-right People’s Party is ahead of the Socialists in most Andalusian provinces — including Seville, where Sánchez’s party has never previously lost in a general election.

A rout in Andalusia would be more than a regional setback for Sánchez. It would further narrow his slim path to reelection, making a fresh national mandate look all the more out of reach.

Reversal of fortune

The Socialists’ decline in Andalusia is, in many ways, a consequence of their own success.

When the party first came to power in the region in 1982, Andalusia was one of Spain’s poorest areas. But under leaders such as Manuel Chaves — who ruled the region for 19 years — it underwent a profound transformation.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Socialist regional governments used EU structural funds to spur economic development, funding infrastructure projects such as the Madrid-Seville high-speed railway.

Between 1982 and 1996, Socialist Prime Minister Felipe González — a proud native son on Seville — championed the region from Madrid, helping secure major investments and backing landmark events such as the Expo ’92 World’s Fair, which brought a fresh wave of investment to Andalusia.

But as regional living standards improved, voters’ expectations rose too — and the party increasingly struggled to meet them.

“There was a paradox of satisfaction,” said Ángel Cazorla, a political scientist at the University of Granada. “Although Andalusians felt the Socialists had overseen decades of progress, and personally felt their lives had improved, the great recession exposed how much remained unfinished or unresolved.” 

By 2018, frustration over persistent problems such as unemployment and strained public services, and corruption cases involving high-ranking regional grandees, ultimately led to the Socialists’ ouster.

Cazorla said the two deadly train accidents that rocked Spain this year, both of which occurred on the iconic Madrid-Seville rail line, were emblematic of the party’s decline. 

“In addition to the human toll, we can list Curro as a victim of these tragedies,” he said, referring to the colorful cartoon bird that served as the mascot of the 1992 Seville World’s Fair and which many Andalusians associate with the prosperity of the Socialist era.

“The deadly accidents are in a lot of ways representative of a social-democratic project that gradually ran out of steam, and that successive governments have failed to look after what had been achieved not only with infrastructure, but public goods and overall quality of life,” he added.

The generational gap

Socialist candidate Toscano is not blind to the reasons the Socialists have lost ground. 

After decades in power, he acknowledged, the party had faced growing pressure from the right, corruption scandals and a failure to adapt its message to changing living standards. “We had shortcomings in our management in recent years,” he said, while arguing the Socialists had nonetheless remained electorally competitive in parts of the region.

Cazorla argued the party’s difficulties go beyond its record in government: It also faces a generational problem. Younger electors who grew up in an already-transformed Andalusia feel little identification with the Socialists or with a regional leadership associated with the discredited administrations of the past. 

“A young left-wing voter is paying attention to a different message — one the old guard is incapable of projecting,” he said, adding Adelante Andalucía, a regionalist party that advocates in favor of greater self-government and left-wing policies, is more likely to seduce local electors.

Toscano, however, remained hopeful that Andalusian voters would turn out for the Socialists in an election he frames as a choice between Sánchez’s progressive agenda and the global conservative wave. 

“We’ve seen public services deteriorate under Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and Javier Milei wielding his ‘chainsaw’ to dismantle Argentina’s welfare state,” he said. “In this election, Spaniards must choose whether to remain a country that continues to make social progress or follow the path of regression we are seeing elsewhere.”

MADRID — Trust us. We are sober, sensible — even slightly dull — managers.

It’s not the world’s catchiest election slogan, but it’s the core message that Spain’s center-right People’s Party is banking on to propel it into government on Nov. 29. Reinforcing the idea that the PP wants to run the EU’s fourth-biggest economy like a competent, unflashy corporation, one senior party official, granted anonymity to speak freely, said the PP was “offering a CEO to lead the country.”

Amid profound frustration with corruption scandals under the Socialist government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, it’s a message with traction, and polls suggest the PP will form the next government.

But it also presents the party with an identity crisis if — as expected — it needs to team up with far-right populists from Vox to build a majority. If the next government is a business, Vox will be a maverick on the board.

Business leader

The devastating Toledo rail crash that killed 69 people on Oct. 28 offered the PP an opportunity to shift the campaign onto territory where it feels comfortable, as party leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo and his close circle doubled down on their strategy to present themselves as steady-handed executives.

Feijóo’s first move after the accident was to chair a closed-door gathering of 15 railway experts to project an image of a jefe interested in technicalities.

A second party official explained to Madrid Playbook that the party’s new mantra was: “Management, management, management.” When Sánchez called the snap election in early October, the PP rolled out posters that read “FINALLY.” In the days following the rail accident, the party added “management” to that original slogan. “Finally, management.”

While that low-drama C-suite approach may appeal to the PP, the obvious political challenge is that Vox — which is eyeing key ministries in the next administration — is running a very different type of campaign. Vox relishes political drama.

It was the only party to push on with campaign rallies immediately after the rail disaster and has accused the government of being “a bunch of crooks” who are planning to “steal the election.” Highly outspoken in its hostility to migration, Vox suggested the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal, which sparked nationwide protests, would never have happened if she had been North African.

Guillermo Fernández Vázquez, a political scientist at Madrid’s Carlos III University, noted that Santiago Abascal and others founded Vox in 2013 precisely in rejection of the moderate profiles that dominated Mariano Rajoy’s PP at the time.

This means the challenge for the PP is now twofold. Firstly, its cachet as calm and collected managers could be eroded by Vox’s incendiary politics. Secondly, the party could be leaving its own ideological right flank exposed to Abascal’s party.

Even facing that second risk, the PP looks set to stick to its guns. “Even if Vox were to take votes from us with more aggressive messages, we want to be the safe haven for centrist voters,” said the first PP official.

Still, the PP is clearly alive to the danger that it will have to maintain an appeal to two types of voter. That is demonstrated by the politicians Feijóo chose for the highly symbolic second and third places on the Madrid list for the election, usually seen as the praetorian guard of the leader: Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, one of the flag bearers of the right-wing faction, and Borja Sémper, representative of the more moderate and liberal wing.

Questionable record

For its part, the Socialist Party isn’t buying the PP’s talk of prudent management.

“For the PP and Vox to try to present themselves as guarantors of good governance is a deception of the public,” said Rebeca Torró, the Socialist Party organization secretary and spokesperson. “Those who, through their denialism, their cuts and the way they weaken public services, are part of the problem and cannot be part of the solution,” Torró added.

Left-wing parties accuse the PP of hypocrisy, pointing out for example that it was a PP-led administration in Valencia that mishandled the deadly floods in October 2024 in which 229 people died. Carlos Mazón, the PP’s then-president of the Valencia region, was at a restaurant for hours as the crisis unfolded. He didn’t resign until a year later.

Alberto Ibáñez, member of parliament for the leftist Valencian party Compromís, said that the PP “is in no position to lecture anyone on public ethics.” The conservative party “is still keeping Mazón in his seat in the Valencian parliament to preserve his parliamentary protection and keep him from being tried,” said Ibáñez.

Intriguingly, however, the Socialists do look like they are trying to play the PP at its own game. After Óscar Puente resigned as minister of transport after the rail crash, Sánchez chose his most technocratic and discreet minister to lead the transport department: Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo. The Socialists also want to look like cool-headed managers.

Division of labor

For now, the PP and Vox seem content to keep out of each other’s way, as long as it enables them to topple Sánchez.

In a recent op-ed in Diario de Cádiz, Enrique García-Máiquez, a Vox candidate for the senate, writing about a possible rightward shift by the PP, said that “it would be wise for the two parties ready to kick out Sánchez not to step on each other’s toes on the dance floor.”

Political scientist Fernández Vázquez thought there were tangible signs of cooperation. “Unlike the 2023 campaign, Catalonia is now a topic that isn’t talked about at all. Why? Because the right’s takeaway was that they didn’t get the majority three years ago due to an extraordinary voter turnout in Catalonia that heavily favored the Socialists,” he said.

But he warned that the PP-Vox truce would likely fall apart after the election.

“If they ultimately form a government, things will not be easy for Feijóo. Vox will exert significant pressure and will derive a certain satisfaction from occasionally forcing his hand and humiliating him — because that’s rooted in Vox’s origins.”

The European Public Prosecutor’s Office is investigating possible fraud involving EU funds for safety, signaling and communications upgrades on Spain’s rail network following a fatal train crash last month.

The EPPO has launched a probe on Spain’s Madrid-Seville high-speed railway line, where 69 people were killed in a collision near Urda, in Toledo province, on Oct. 28. Óscar Puente, who has since resigned as transport minister, said a computer failure followed by human error caused the crash.

Investigators for the EPPO carried out on Friday searches at Adif, the state rail infrastructure manager, the State Railway Safety Agency and the Spanish Court of Auditors, with support from national authorities.

The EPPO did not clarify what investigators are looking for or whether any money was misspent, and no findings have been made public. It added that no further details would be released at this stage.

A first probe, opened in March after the Adamuz crash that killed 46 people, covered EU funds for track maintenance on the same line. There has been no public update on its progress.

The EU’s Transport Commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas expressed deep concern at a press briefing on Wednesday over two serious accidents in Spain within a year, calling them “very worrying” and “definitely not something we want to see.” He noted that Spain had reached out to the EU’s railway agency, ERA, to assist with the ongoing national investigation.

Two senior Spanish officials have already stepped down following the Urda crash. Puente resigned Tuesday, calling his decision “a matter of political dignity,” while Adif President Luis Pedro Marco de la Peña quit Wednesday, less than 24 hours later.

Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo is running the Transport Ministry until the Nov. 29 election. The crash took place just weeks before the vote, with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialists already trailing in the polls and facing further political fallout over the tragedy.