Vox loses votes over its pro-Israel shift and reliance on Trump

Vox is bleeding support: from enthusiasm to 50% undecided

A few months ago, almost everyone a commentator knew was planning to vote for Vox. Today, counting the undecided and those who simply won't bother, that figure has dropped to 50%-60%. The estimate circulating in the debate is telling: from 205 seats to fewer than 190. It is not a catastrophe, but it is a serious warning for a party that until recently seemed unstoppable.

The immediate trigger is the international context. A widely shared tweet mocks the idea of having a Vox defence minister and voting for them in the middle of a geopolitical storm: "Trump's lapdogs, capable of sending your children to die in a pointless war." The criticism is not coming only from the left. From within the party's potential electorate, some point out that what is demoralising them is not the pro-Americanism but "their being openly pro-immigration, their internal battles and the fact that their leaders have little culture."

The pro-Israel shift that doesn't sit well

There is a striking consensus in the analysis: Vox's positioning on Israel and its alignment with the European conservative right is taking its toll. "In Spain the Jewish people are not popular. On the left because of the State of Israel, and on the right for reasons that cannot be said," one comment sums up. Another puts it bluntly: "the votes Vox is losing over Abascal's Zionism are not going to go to another Zionist party."

The paradox is that this same shift is being read as internal house-cleaning. "If the mainstream media are now attacking VOX, it is precisely because it is shifting its positions towards the right side of the European conservative right," argues one participant, who celebrates the departure of "the Espinosa de los Monteros crowd and the rest of the central rabble of aristocratic-neoliberal-pro-Zionists." The problem, he adds, is that the party arrives "completely rudderless at 2027" after years talking about "the West" and the "new world order" as if Spain were entering the old order instead of leaving it.

The PP's campaign and a wearing-out brand

Not everyone buys the decline narrative. "It's a PP campaign. The PP people are terrified by VOX's surge, and the surge isn't slowing down," another retorts, convinced that the party keeps rising "unstoppably because the PP offers no solutions to real problems." The disagreement over the trend is total: some see a collapse, others a media operation to halt an ascent that shows no sign of stopping.

What nearly all the comments do share is distrust of the political class as a whole. "We are orphans and alone, and there is no one who actually represents us at all; they are all puppets whose strings are pulled by the same masters," one voice declares. Another compares the cycle to Podemos's: "The honeymoon phase is over. Salary caps for officials are no longer convenient, I'll buy myself a nice villa, expulsion of very capable people from the party while the mediocres stay on."

The voter left without a home

The underlying issue is an uncomfortable question: who does someone vote for if they want to stop policies they consider proge but also reject Vox's foreign alignments? One participant's ironic answer — "you've convinced me, I'll vote for the beloved leader Pedro Sánchez so he can regularise another 4 or 5 million Africans" — captures the dead end. And as another points out, "there is no one more proge in Spain than Pedro Sánchez," however much Abascal is accused of being "a Trump suck-up, as if Sánchez hadn't been one in his day for Obama or Biden."

The contradiction hangs in the air: a party defined by what it rejects, now generating rejection for what it embraces. Is the erosion a temporary dip, or a sign that its electorate is starting to look elsewhere?