“¡No pasarán!,” chanted supporters of Spain’s center-left Socialist Party (PSOE) as they celebrated an unexpected comeback for their party in last Sunday’s general election. Faced with widespread predictions that the conservative Partido Popular (PP) and far-right Vox were about to sweep into government, left-wing voters mobilized en masse. The results vindicated Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez’s wager on an anti-fascist campaign strategy, as the right-wing parties failed to win a working majority.

The disappointment of the Right’s plans was mainly owed to heavy losses for Vox, as the far-right party fell from fifty-two MPs in 2019 to thirty-three on Sunday. The PP topped the polls, with 32 percent and 136 seats. This increased its vote share by over half, mainly by eating up the support of the now-defunct Ciudadanos, a Spanish-unionist and doggedly neoliberal party that rose to prominence in the 2010s but did not run in this election. Yet, overall the PP-Vox pair remained seven seats short of being able to form a government — and, having alienated regionalist forces with its aggressive Spanish nationalism, the pair now has no path to power.

After an unbroken series of conservative/far-right coalitions had been elected across Europe over the last year, Spain halted the continent’s turn to the right — not least because of a massive turnout in Catalonia in favor of the current left-leaning government.