“I know that many people are worried, but Spain is much greater [than Vox],” insisted the country’s left-wing deputy prime minister Yolanda Díaz at the end of the final debate before today’s general election. She came away from Thursday’s contest as the unanimous winner, forcefully confronting Vox’s far-right leader Santiago Abascal on workers’ rights and gender violence while calling out her coalition partner, the center-left prime minister Pedro Sánchez, for his reticence to tackle the country’s housing crisis. “We are defending a public housing stock, not tax breaks [for developers],” Díaz told him.

Yet while her new left-unity Sumar platform has gained real traction during the final stretch of the campaign, the prospect of the far right entering government for the first time since the country’s transition to democracy in the 1970s remains present. Final polling last weekend showed the gap between the right and left blocs tightening, but a coalition between the conservative Popular Party and Vox still looks the most likely government — though with an increasingly high chance of a hung parliament.

In El Pais’s final poll from last Monday, the right bloc is three seats short, with the Partido Popular (PP) leading Sánchez’s Socialists (PSOE) 32.9 percent to 28.7 percent (or 135 seats to 110) while Vox and Sumar are tied at 13.5 percent and between 36 to 38 seats each. In such an outcome, the right bloc would probably be able to count on the support of a small number of regional MPs to secure a wafer-thin majority, but a late left-wing mobilization could turn the tables. In particular, Vox and Sumar are currently in a battle for the last seat in fourteen small- or medium-sized provinces; whoever finishes third will likely take the prize.