In the same way that a year ago Vox entered the Parliament of Catalonia in strength - with 11 seats and 7.67% of the vote - the far right party, with its third position in Castilla y León, is in political terms the winner of the elections in the autonomous community, where it took 13 seats and 17% of the vote. The incumbent president of the region, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, of the conservative Popular Party, won the election with a victory that was more double-edged than it might seem at first glance: he called an early election relying on polls that took him closer to an absolute majority, and not only has that not happened, but the party has fallen well short, and, moreover, the results of this Sunday leave it in the hands of the party led by Santiago Abascal.
The far right will hold the key to governance in Castilla y León and who knows if they will even impose on Mañueco, as a necessary condition for facilitating his re-election, their presence in the executive, something that certainly makes PP leader Pablo Casado nervous, as it would puncture his strategy for a future Spanish election and irritate party figures such as Galicia's Alberto Núñez Feijóo and even the Andalusian Juanma Moreno, who also aspires to call his own elections early, some time around this summer. By contrast, it will all be to the liking of the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the only PP leader capable of neutralizing and absorbing Vox, as she showed last May, and, obviously, of José María Aznar.
Although it was not an easy election for the Socialists of the PSOE, the poverty of their result is clear: the bloc of the left falls from 37 parliamentarians to 29 in a chamber of 81 MPs. The Socialists slip back, from 35 to 28, seven seats that largely serve to nourish the parties of the Emptied Spain platform which, under different acronyms, obtain representation in Soria for the first time (3 deputies and highest ranked political force with 41% of the vote), León (3 seats, tripling their previous haul) and Ávila (holding the one they already had). The Socialists are only comforted that the rise of Vox will serve to alert the whole state to the genuine risk that the far-right party will provide a springboard for the PP to enter the Moncloa palace at the next Spanish elections. A harvest that is too meagre and confirms, in part, that the PSOE is losing strength - although not with the intensity suggested by the continuous polls in the right-wing media.
Separate mention must be made of Ciudadanos and its swansong, with the political group having fallen from 12 parliamentarians to only one, hanging on in the Valladolid constituency. The party confirms that it is no more than a flat hologram and that only inertia from the past has allowed it to still claim tens of thousands of votes, although without reaching even 5% of the overall vote in the election. All this, the same week that it became known that the Martínez-Echevarría legal partnership has dispensed of Albert Rivera's services because he is a layabout. Cs, Rivera, Arrimadas and their whole court are starting to disappear from public life, which is certainly good news. In fact, the party's disguise, as a pretend liberal group, has slipped off abruptly.