With another general election in Spain on 10 November – the fourth in four years – the latest poll by the CIS public research institute predicts that Pedro Sánchez‘s Socialist Party (PSOE) will win 32.2% of the ballot, with between 133 and 150 seats in the Spanish Congress.
The poll’s results, which were published on Tuesday, also say that the right-wing People’s Party (PP) will likely come in second place with between 74 and 81 seats, with the Ciudadanos (Cs) party (27 to 35) and left-wing Podemos groups (37-45 seats) vying for third place.
The November election comes a little over six months since the last Spanish general election on 28 April, in which PSOE won 28.6% of the vote and 123 seats, with PP getting 66 seats, Cs with 57 seats, and Podemos with 42 seats.
Since the general election in the spring, the Socialists have acted as Spain’s caretaker government, with Sánchez forced to call the November snap election after his party was unable to garner the 176 seats in congress needed to form a majority government.
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Since the 28 April election, the conflict with Catalonia has continued at the forefront of Spanish politics, posing the greatest political and constitutional crisis that Spain has had to face since the return to democracy in the 1970s.
The survey of almost 18,000 respondents that the poll’s results are based on was carried out between 21 September and 13 October, before the Supreme Court sentenced Catalan leaders to prison, which sparked widespread disturbances across Catalonia. It was also held before the recent exhumation of Franco – a previous key election pledge of Pedro Sánchez.
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What’s more, the CIS has come in for criticism from some opposition parties, who have accused the research institute of bias towards PSOE, given that it was Sánchez who appointed José Félix Tezanos as its head.
This CIS poll differs from most polls published recently by a variety of media outlets, which suggest that Sánchez’s party would repeat its results from April, with PP getting as many as 100 seats, and a notable upswing for the far-right Vox party.
ERC the winner in Catalonia
As far as the Catalan parties, the latest poll predicts that the pro-independence Esquerra Republicana (ERC) party of jailed former vice president Oriol Junqueras would be the big winner, improving on its current 15 seats to between 16 and 18.
The Catalan Socialists (PSC) would stay in second place, going from 12 seats in congress to 13 or 14, with the left-wing Catalunya en Comú gaining one or two seats to take its total to nine, but with the pro-independence Junts per Catalunya (JxCat) dropping from 7 seats to between 4 and 6.
The poll also says that the pro-independence far-left CUP, who are contesting a general election for the first time, would gain one or two seats in congress.
