Spain's PSOE lost in 2023 yet governs: the math that repeats the trick

He lost the election, cut deals, and still sits in Moncloa: the 2023 precedent

The starting point is a defeat. In the last general election the right-wing bloc won more votes and still failed to get its leader invested as prime minister: it fell two seats short of a majority, according to the count used in the post-election analysis. The PSOE (Spain's Socialist Party), with the backing of parties demanding territorial concessions, returned to power. And since then, the term has become an unsolvable sudoku in which the only thing holding its partners together was extracting concessions for their own particular region. With that precedent on the table, the question running through any political conversation is not who will win, but whether the winner will be able to govern.

What peine in 2023 and why the script is repeating

The right's campaign was, by the most widespread account, a self-inflicted disaster: two months of attrition against its necessary partner, flirting with the idea of a "good PSOE," and skipping the debates because "this one's already won." The hare and the tortoise. The result was an investiture majority that fell two votes short, and a government that has not managed to pass anything significant all term.

Hence the antiestéticar that dominates the analysis: that history will repeat itself with the same faces and different names. Some argue that the party now playing kingmaker will break its promise not to support the current prime minister. Others add a more uncomfortable nuance: the electorate that decides is not the one shouting on social media, but the one collecting a paycheck.

The vote that decides: pensioners, the self-employed and landlords

The most repeated thesis is that the current government has locked up the pensioner vote, along with tenants, healthcare and teaching staff, plus what is colloquially called the grandchildren vote. Against that, the right would count on the rural vote, the security forces, the judiciary and the self-employed, who number no fewer than three million.

The problem is that this bloc is not monolithic. A self-employed worker who lives off public contracts sees their taxes rise, but also their income grow. And many pensioners who voted for the right out of tradition have seen their direct interests clash with their party's program. When that happens, the temptation to stay home and let whatever happens happen is very strong. The full calculation, match by match, yields a surprising margin.

The inflation nobody analyzes in the shopping basket

The economic argument weighing most on the government's erosion is neither unemployment nor debt: it is eggs. Inflation is a global phenomenon —in the United States diesel trades at 1.60 and even its president has groveled before his Russian counterpart to get fuel shipped over— but the average voter does not make that analysis. They see eggs going up at the supermarket and blame the government. Full stop.

In the rental market the effect is more twisted. Landlords who have pulled their apartments off the market and preferred to sell them are proof that something is not working, and that peine before the de facto expropriation decrees came into force. Supply shrinks, prices rise, and the tenant blames the landlord. The landlord blames the government. The government blames global inflation. Nobody can quite square why.

Controlling the machinery: from the Public Prosecutor's Office to Indra

The part that most unsettles those analyzing real power is not the vote, but the infrastructure. The Public Prosecutor's Office, the Constitutional Court, the public broadcaster, Telefónica, the CIS (the official polling institute), the State Bar, the Tax Agency, Indra, the Banco de España, the Instituto Cervantes, the National Police, the Civil Guard, the INE (the electoral commission), the Council of State and Correos (the postal service). The list, recited from memory, is the argument of those who claim the current prime minister wields superpowers galore.

The counterargument is that this control is no longer absolute. Some claim the prime minister rebelled against those who put him there and that the structures that allowed him to do so no longer obey him. Others reply that Indra and Correos remain in the hands of boards appointed by the government. The exact point where the analysis gets stuck is this: nobody knows how much of that apparatus answers to one person and how much to an institutional inertia that outlives any occupant.

With these materials, the only hope left for part of the electorate is supernatural: that the election falls on the day of the Great Promise, a week after the antiestéticast of Christ the King. It is not a statistical argument. But neither was the one in 2023.