There was only one winner in Sunday’s Spanish elections. Securing the most seats by a comfortable margin (though not an overall majority), incumbent premier Pedro Sánchez successfully harnessed the apparent threat of a hard-right government to mobilize progressives behind his center-left PSOE (123 of 350 seats). While the Franco-nostalgists of Vox made a significant breakthrough, securing 10 percent nationally, ultimately they fell short of preelection expectations, and the Right performed poorly overall. As for the Left, Unidas Podemos, campaigned strongly despite the polarization over the national question, and managed to retain 42 of the 70 MPs they had gained last time out.

While Vox entered parliament for the first time, arguably the biggest shock of the night was the collapse of Spain’s major conservative force, the Popular Party. Also facing competition from the liberal/center-right Ciudadanos, it saw its share of seats more than half from 137 to 66. If the decisive Andalusian contest last December saw the parties of the Right take over government in Spain’s largest region, this failed to translate into gains on the national stage, in a ballot marked by greatly increased voter turnout.

Sánchez was effective in casting himself as a bulwark against an increasingly radical right, in which Vox also set the policy agenda for Ciudadanos and the PP. However, this also displays the precariousness of the PSOE leader’s position. Far from fighting the election around the promise of serious social-democratic reforms, his message was mostly defined in negative terms, by what he opposes. In recent years his PSOE has swung from the center to the left and back again in rapid succession. As he weighs up whether he can govern without Podemos’s potentially destabilizing presence, Sánchez faces a fresh moment of truth.