“A very hard blow.” Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez couldn’t mask his disappointment at the resounding defeat for his Socialist Party (PSOE) in its traditional stronghold of Andalusia last Sunday. In a seismic shift in the country’s electoral politics, the conservative Partido Popular (PP) swept to victory in Spain’s most populous region, winning an absolute majority of seats in the Andalusian parliament for the first time. The overall right-wing bloc (which includes the PP and the far-right Vox) won nearly twice as many seats as the broad left, while the PSOE also suffered a symbolically important defeat in the regional capital, Seville, losing the hometown of its historic leader Felipe González for the first time during the post–Francisco Franco era.

PSOE’s national coalition partners also suffered humiliation. The joint electoral platform uniting radical-left forces Unidas Podemos, Izquierda Unida, and Más País slumped to less than 8 percent of the vote. “Like the PSOE, we took a beating, but we added to our own miseries with our divisions and infighting,” Unidas Podemos MP Txema Guijarro told Jacobin. Indeed, the radical left ran rival lists. Teresa Rodríguez, Podemos’s former leader in the region, ran an effective and combative campaign, but ultimately this split the left-wing vote, helping contribute to the collapse in its seat share from seventeen in 2018 to just seven on Sunday.