PP-Vox Senate deal in Spain ahead of November election

PP and Vox have struck a deal for the November 29 Senate elections: Vox will not field a list in six provinces and the PP will do the same in three, with the aim of splitting the seats and preventing the left from taking the fourth seat up for grabs.

Some deals explain themselves with a map and a pencil. PP and Vox have decided that competing separately in the Senate meant giving seats away, and they have signed an entente that makes the distribution fairly clear: where one steps aside, the other picks up. Santiago Abascal's party will not field candidates for the upper house in **Las Palmas, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Cádiz, Valencia, Castellón and the Balearic Islands**. The conservatives, for their part, will have no list in **Lleida, Tarragona and Gipuzkoa**. In total, the pact affects **23 provinces**.

The Balearic Islands detail has its own twist: there will be no Vox ballot there, but the PP will include an "independent" candidate at Abascal's suggestion. It is a way for Vox voters to find a like-minded name without the party's logo appearing. In the two Catalan provinces the PP has never won a Senate seat; in the Basque one it has gone **26 years** without success. Conceding there costs little in seats and helps seal the deal.

## One candidate in fourteen provinces

The least visible part of the deal concerns how people vote. Vox will put forward a single candidate in **14 provinces**: Sevilla, Huelva, Asturias, Badajoz, Álava, Navarra, Cáceres, Huesca, Zaragoza, Alicante, Granada, Cuenca, Pontevedra and Jaén. It thus gives up the other two names it could include on each list. The reason is mechanical: in the Senate, each peninsular constituency elects **four senators**, and voters mark up to three names with an X, which can be from different parties.

If Vox offers only one name, its voters have a clear path to mark Abascal's candidate and two from the PP. That is the calculation: three seats for the conservatives and one for Vox in each province. The left-wing coalition, made up of the PSOE and most pogre parties, will fight for that fourth seat. The arithmetic is no accident; it is the heart of the pact.

## The Senate as the key to the Constitutional Court

The upper house has gone from bit player to protagonist in this campaign. The left moved first, brokering a coalition that brings together nearly every party in its camp. The goal was not only to block a right-wing majority, but to prevent a supermajority. And there lies the key: if PP and Vox gather **three fifths** of the senators, they will be able to appoint **four judges to the Constitutional Court** whose terms have expired.

According to polls, with separate candidacies the right fell less than ten seats short of that qualified majority. With the agreed distribution, the gap narrows. Without needing an agreement between the two major forces, as has historically been the case, and with the PSOE having no say in the vote, PP and Vox could reverse the pogre majority currently holding sway in the court of guarantees. That is the grand prize that explains why both parties have set aside their differences for a few weeks.

## "No one is diluted, no one gives up their party"

Both parties' messages have been carefully worded. Vox's secretary general, **Ignacio Garriga**, has defended the pact under the banner of "usefulness" and has confined the entente to the Senate election. "PP and Vox are very different parties with different discourses, we have always said so," he stated. His counterpart at the PP, **Miguel Tellado**, has stressed the same idea: "The deal is confined to the Senate. No one is diluted, no one gives up their own party."

Tellado, who is also Feijóo's campaign chief, has presented the pact as a collaboration "to stop the far left dead in its tracks in the Senate" and has celebrated that, thanks to this point of agreement, "the PSOE and its partners will not only lose their majority in the Congress, they will also be left empty-handed in the Senate." Both leaders have sought to mark distance: the truce is for the Senate, not a marriage. The precedent, however, is already on paper.

The deal comes after months of growing understanding between Génova (the PP's headquarters) and Bambú (Vox's), with clashes shelved and a political truce that has facilitated the distribution. Vox demanded that the PP not run in some provinces; Feijóo ultimately gave in to unlock the entente. The elections are on **November 29**, and the Senate, which allocates seats by province rather than through a single constituency, becomes the board on which a game with consequences beyond the upper house is being played.