Vox in Spain
Vox's seat loss in the July 2023 Spanish general election, what the campaign against it was doing at the time, and the one effect of that campaign that has been measured.
n July 2023 Spain's far-right party Vox lost seats while a campaign was being run against it. Did that campaign have anything to do with the result?
Junta Electoral Central, 2019 and 2023
The official Spanish results for November 2019, where Vox took 15.08% of the vote and 52 of 350 seats.
Vox's own count across the two elections: 3,656,979 votes and 52 seats in November 2019, 3,057,000 votes and 33 seats in July 2023.
Rodon & Rodríguez (2024)
A paper on the 2023 election that works out where Vox's lost seats went and why.
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Vox lost a third more of its seats than of its vote, and the gap is district size rather than anything the campaign did.
CEMOP (2024)
A yearly survey series that asks people how much they dislike each party.
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While the message against Vox was loudest, the surveys recorded dislike of Vox at its lowest level in the series.
Rojo-Martínez (2025)
A study of survey data collected during the 2023 campaign, on whether hostility to Vox changed how people voted.
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The one measured effect of the frame lands on the Socialists, not on Vox.
Regional results, 2025–26
Official results for the Extremadura regional election of December 2025.
Extremadura, Castilla y León and Aragón all returned Vox higher after it left their governments.
RTVE on Extremadura, 2025
RTVE’s report on the December 2025 Extremadura result: Vox took 11 seats after nearly doubling its vote to almost 89,000 and became the key to forming a government.
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DatosRTVE on Vox’s regional seats
DatosRTVE’s count of Vox’s regional seats from its first entry in 2018 to March 2026.
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Synthesis
The years the anti-Vox frame ran at full volume are the years Vox was rising, not falling.
No design here answers whether the campaign lowered the Vox vote: the survey evidence is a single cross-section taken during one campaign.
Comparing 2019 and 2023 is comparing two elections, which cannot separate the campaign from everything else that changed in between.
What would settle it: the same voters followed from 2019 to 2023, or a place where the anti-Vox message ran in one area and not another.
Linked notes
/notes/the-front-republicain
/notes/canada-1993-right-split
/notes/far-right-salience
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