Vox has taken many risks with the decision to break with the PP in the Government of the Region of Murcia since Fernando López Miras, as president of the autonomous region, has in his hands the possibility of calling early elections and would achieve an absolute majority. This is what emerges from the NC Report survey for LA RAZÓN, carried out with 1,000 interviews between July 13 and 16, just after Santiago Abascal announced the break with the Popular Party. The PP would reach 24 of the 23 seats it needs to win an absolute majority and would make a statement that would leave Vox without any capacity to influence.
The PP currently has 21 of the 45 seats allocated in the Parliament of the Region of Murcia, so it is two away from an absolute majority and, for that reason, it has needed the support of Vox in this legislature for the investiture of López Miras. With a repeat election, it would win three seats and exceed the barrier of 23 that marks the absolute majority, while the PSOE, Vox and the Podemos-Sumar space would lose one. The socialists would remain at 12, Abascal’s party at 8 and the purple party at one.
The PP would consolidate its absolute majority on the high voter loyalty it maintains (90.1% of its voters would choose the same ballot paper again) and at the expense of the other parties. In this sense, the PP would gain three seats and 66,000 new votes, of which 15,000 would come from Vox and 15,000 from the PSOE. There are 29,000 votes that would come from new voters (those who have acquired the right to vote thanks to coming of age, mainly).
The transfer of voters from Vox and the PSOE to the PP reflects that the PP is in the centre and can attract voters to both its right and left at a time when both Abascal and Sánchez seem to have dragged their parties into noise and instability. However, it can also be seen how the flow of voters from the PP to Vox continues to exist as they would move up to 10,000 (in any case, the balance is negative for Vox).
In any case, the PP and the right-wing bloc would still be far from losing their absolute majority: that is, in a repeat election in the Region of Murcia the only unknown seems to be whether the PP are capable of governing alone.
The left is condemned to remain in opposition, something that has happened since 1995 in the autonomous region. The PSOE of José Vélez would not raise its head and would remain at 12 seats, just one deputy above its worst historical result of 2011. The truth is that the PSOE of Murcia has not repeated a candidate in the elections since 2003, a sign of the poor results and instability that has been reaped by a party that governed with absolute majorities between 1983 and 1995.
In the space to the left of the PSOE, Sumar would emerge, replacing Podemos, which currently has two seats. Yolanda Díaz’s party would take representation from Ione Belarra and Irene Montero’s party, although they would only obtain one deputy. In this sense, Sumar would attract 34.2% of Podemos voters, while Podemos would remain with 21.8% of voters. In any case, the evolution of this space is very volatile and, from one week to the next, things can change: what does seem clear is that Podemos and Sumar would run separately.
In this way, a repeat election would only benefit the PP, which is the party in power. If López Miras takes the step, he could manage to govern for the first time with an absolute majority since he has been in charge of the presidency since May 2017, but has never exceeded 23 seats. However, the evolution has been remarkably positive: in 2019 he won 16 deputies and, already in 2023, he grew to 21. In fact, in the last election, López Miras came very close to 300,000 votes, a figure that the PP had not achieved since 2011.
It is worth remembering that in places where the PP has an absolute majority, Vox has hardly any voice and is reduced to irrelevance. In this sense, the Community of Madrid is the clearest example since there it has a candidate with a lot of weight, such as Rocío Monasterio, but she goes unnoticed in the face of the authority and prominence of Isabel Díaz Ayuso with an absolute majority.
José Ángel Antelo, former vice-president of the Murcian government and leader of Vox in the region, is probably aware of this, because he did not seem very happy with Abascal’s decision to leave the PP Executive. In addition to Antelo’s vice-presidency, Vox also managed the Ministry of Public Works.