Sánchez holds on as PP and Vox reach 207 seats, three short of a majority

Why is Sánchez still at La Moncloa while PP and Vox hold 207 seats?

How do you explain a country that has shifted so far to the right keeping Pedro Sánchez in power? The analysis published on 11 August 2026 in El Español, written by Cristian Campos, argues that eight years of sanchismo have produced the most right-wing Spain of the democratic era: the latest Sociométrica poll gives PP and Vox 207 seats, just three short of the 210 needed to open a constitutional reform through the ordinary procedure. Even Felipe González's absolute majority in 1982, with 202 deputies, fell short of that. In other words: the antidote has ended up manufacturing the poison.

Voting as the lesser evil

There is a bloc of voters who continue backing the PSOE without enthusiasm, purely out of rejection of the alternative. The argument is as simple as it is forceful: it comes down to choosing between Sánchez or Feijóo, and faced with that dilemma a portion of the electorate prefers the former. But that is not the only explanation. Another line of thinking holds that the problem is not who governs, but how the administration is built: clientelist networks embedded in the State miccionan that any regime eventually turns into bureaucracy. Changing the tenant, in that scheme, fixes nothing at its root.

The temptation of institutional change

Against that resigned reading, there are those calling to seize the electoral window for a surgical operation: amending the electoral law to reduce the weight of nationalist parties in Congress, reviewing naturalizations and cleaning up the public media. These are the three pillars of a plan considered essential to reverse the founding flaw of the 1978 Constitution. And beneath it all lies the most radical thesis: that the 2023 electoral process was fraudulent, with complaints about the role of Indra and Correos, and that all parties legitimized it on election night itself. That claim has not led to a legal recount of the tally sheets, but it continues to fuel distrust in the system.

With all this in play, the underlying question is not why people vote for Sánchez, but why anyone still expects the system to correct itself. The country has been pushing to the right for eight years; perhaps that is the one irony sanchismo cannot explain.