The December 2 regional elections in Andalusia unleashed a political earthquake in Spain. After thirty-six years of continuous rule by the center-left Socialists (PSOE), a bloc of right-wing parties won a majority of votes in the southern region. This reactionary surge included an unexpected breakthrough for the extreme-right Vox; if most opinion polls had placed it between 2 and 5 percent of the vote, it ultimately obtained 11 percent and tweleve seats in the regional parliament. This, in a country that had long prided itself on being the only major European state that had no extreme-right party represented in its parliaments. As results came in, the likes of Marine Le Pen and David Duke posted messages on social media congratulating Vox’s leader, Santiago Abascal.

Much of the analysis of Andalusia’s swing to the right has focused on increased nationalist sentiment in the wake of last year’s Catalan independence crisis. During the Andalusian campaign the two major right-wing forces, the Popular Party (PP) and Ciudadanos (C’s, Citizens), not only stressed the ongoing threat to Spanish territorial unity but also sought to equate a vote for the PSOE with backing for regional “separatists.” Indeed, it kicked off with the PP’s new hard-right leader Pablo Casado accusing PSOE prime minister Pedro Sánchez of being a “golpista” or coup-plotter because of his dependence on Catalan parties for his parliamentary majority.

Such rhetoric played well among conservative voters, and was indicative of an increasingly radicalized Spanish right. Yet probably decisive in securing their electoral majority was a historic abstention among left-wing voters. If the combined support of the right-wing bloc increased by 275,000 votes in comparison with the 2015 elections, this cannot fully account for the 700,000 lost votes between the PSOE and the Podemos–United Left coalition, Adelante Andalucía. As the United Left (IU) leader Alberto Garzón stressed, the reactionary bloc’s electoral weight “would not have been so great except for demobilization in working-class neighborhoods.”