The green formation burst into the April voting spectacularly and grew even more in November
Vox was the third most voted formation in the general elections of November 10, 2019. The formation, founded at the end of 2013 in response to the turn towards the center of the PP by Mariano Rajoy, reached the elections after playing a very active role against the Catalan independence process throughout 2017 and 2018, which, together with the public support of prominent figures in Spanish society such as the bullfighter Morante de la Puebla or the writer Sánchez Dragó, provided notoriety to the young party led by Santiago Abascal. Previously, it had been very moderately successful, such as in the 2015 general elections, in which it obtained 57,753 votes, 0.23% of the total, and fell far short of winning a seat. In 2016 it even got worse, gathering 46,781 votes.
The first serious notice of the formation came in the Andalusian elections of 2018. In them, Vox won 12 seats and almost 11% of the support, being the Spanish version of the far-right wave that was beginning to become very palpable throughout Europe. This step was endorsed by the general elections of April 2019, in which Abascal’s party improved its result by 5597.3%, attracting up to 2,688,092 voters and winning 24 seats. Although it was not done with any senator, the irruption of the greens on the political scene was already undeniable.
And if her appearance in April had been conspicuous, she could still improve. The November elections gave Vox another boost, which grew to 3,656,979 votes (36% more than in April) and soared in seats, going from 24 to 52 and becoming the third most supported political force in the country. In addition, he set foot in the Senate getting two senators. Its irruption, on the other hand, became a problem for the Popular Party, which saw how the green formation ‘stealed’ its support, and, above all, for Ciudadanos, which got rid of it from then on (it fell from 57 seats in April to 10 in November) until it practically disappeared from the political spectrum.
By provinces, Madrid was the one that contributed the most deputies to those of Abascal, with 7. They obtained 3 in Valencia, Alicante and Murcia, and 2 in Barcelona, Seville, Malaga, Cádiz, the Balearic Islands, Almería and Toledo. They also won seats in Las Palmas, Asturias, Granada, Tenerife, Zaragoza, Badajoz, Córdoba, Cantabria, Castellón, Ciudad Real, Huelva, Jaén, Valladolid, Albacete, Cáceres, León, Salamanca, Guadalajara, Segovia, Zamora, Ávila and Ceuta. In the rest of constituencies they did not have representation.
Regarding the results for the Senate, vox was harmed by the distribution system used in Spain, since, although it was the fifth most voted party, with 3,229,631 supports, it only got 2 senators, the same result as Teruel exists! with just 57,340 votes, for example, while ERC, with 3,040,779, won 11. However, there were more bloody cases, such as that of the Podemos-IU coalition, which did not obtain any senator despite its almost six million votes, or Ciudadanos, which reached close to five million but did not achieve representation in the Upper House either.