Spain’s right-wing People’s Party (PP) and the far-right Vox party have agreed to coordinate their Senate candidacies across 23 provinces ahead the general election on 29 November, seeking to consolidate the right-wing vote and strengthen their influence over some of the country’s most important institutions.
Announced on Monday, hours before the deadline for submitting candidates, the agreement involves reciprocal withdrawals, places for Vox-backed independents on PP lists and a reduced number of Vox candidates elsewhere. ALSO READ: Abascal offers Senate deal with PP as left unites to challenge its majority.
The immediate aim is to preserve and expand the right’s majority in the upper house against a joint challenge from the Socialists (PSOE) and their left-wing allies. But PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo has also outlined a more ambitious objective: securing the three-fifths majority needed to approve key judicial appointments without socialist support.
The arrangement marks a significant step towards a much closer electoral cooperation between the two parties, after the PP sought to emphasise its distance from Vox during the previous general election campaign. ALSO READ: Feijóo leaves door open to governing with Vox and sets out plans to revisit abortion and euthanasia laws.
Where the parties will stand aside
Vox will not submit its own Senate candidacies in Las Palmas, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Cádiz, Valencia, Castellón and the Balearic Islands. Instead, the PP will include an independent proposed by Vox on its lists in those provinces, in second or third position.
In return, the PP will withdraw from Gipuzkoa, Girona and Tarragona. The party has gone 26 years without winning a senator in Gipuzkoa and has never secured Senate representation in either of the two Catalan provinces.
Those withdrawals leave PP supporters in the three provinces without a candidate standing under their party’s name, effectively directing those who want to support the agreement towards Vox.
A different arrangement applies in another 14 other provinces: Sevilla, Huelva, Asturias, Badajoz, Álava, Navarra, Cáceres, Huesca, Zaragoza, Alicante, Granada, Cuenca, Pontevedra and Jaén.
Vox will field just one Senate candidate in each. Its supporters will therefore be able to vote for that candidate and use their remaining two choices to support PP candidates. PP voters will still be able to select all three of their party’s candidates.
Elsewhere, both parties will contest the Senate election separately under their own names.
The strategy takes advantage of the Senate’s voting system, under which voters choose individual candidates and can support people from different parties. In most mainland provinces, four senators are elected and each voter may select up to three candidates. Seats go to those receiving the most votes, making coordination potentially decisive where parties competing for similar voters might otherwise divide their support. Different voting limits apply in the island constituencies, Ceuta and Melilla.
A last-minute agreement with wider ambitions
PP secretary-general Miguel Tellado, who negotiated the agreement personally, announced its terms at the party’s headquarters in Madrid.
According to El País, Feijóo and Vox leader Santiago Abascal spoke last week to help advance the negotiations. The final agreement was reached on Monday morning, with last-minute discussions delaying Tellado’s scheduled press conference by almost an hour.
Some details remained unresolved when the deal was announced, including the identities of the Vox-proposed independents who would appear on PP lists.
Tellado presented the arrangement as a response to what he described as efforts by the ‘radical left’ to take control of the Senate.
‘This cooperation between PP and Vox is confined to the Senate and is based on the conviction that it is the best thing for Spain,’ he said.
He accused Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of having ‘tried to thwart the desire for change by every possible means’ and argued that the parties needed to protect the upper house’s centre-right majority.
‘The PSOE and its partners will not only lose their majority in Congress, but will also be left disappointed in their hopes of securing one in the Senate. With this understanding, PP and Vox recognise that the upper house is essential to advancing the process of national reconstruction,’ Tellado said.
The PP already held an absolute Senate majority during the outgoing parliamentary term and used it to maintain pressure on Sánchez’s government, including through more than half a dozen parliamentary inquiries.
A three-fifths majority would give the right considerably greater scope. The Senate proposes four of the Constitutional Court’s 12 members, with each requiring support from three-fifths of senators. Securing that threshold would allow PP and Vox to approve their choices without needing PSOE votes when those positions come up for renewal, potentially changing the court’s ideological balance. The remaining members are proposed by Congress, the government and the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ).
The Senate also selects 10 of the CGPJ’s 20 members, again requiring a three-fifths majority. The council oversees the judiciary and makes senior judicial appointments, including to the Supreme Court and its criminal chamber, which hears cases involving political corruption. The electoral objective therefore extends beyond control of the upper house itself.
Vox’s parliamentary group remains uncertain
The agreement also offers Vox a route to greater Senate representation, although it does not guarantee the party its own parliamentary group.
Vox failed to win any directly elected Senate seats at the previous general election, three years ago. During the outgoing term, it had five senators appointed through regional parliaments following its government agreements with the PP in several regions.
The party sought assurances during the negotiations that it would secure a Senate group of its own, for which a minimum of 10 senators is required.
Tellado said that outcome would depend on how many seats Vox won at the election. Despite the extent of the cooperation, he rejected the suggestion that the parties were merging their identities.
0There are not two parties dissolving into one here; nobody is giving up their party initials,’ he said. ‘We are not the PSOE, we are not the Frente Amplio and those 22 organisations that make it up.’ ALSO READ: Spain’s left heads into election divided as unity talks collapse.
He described the pact as ‘intelligent cooperation’ and praised both parties’ willingness to set aside differences, citing their ‘sense of state’ and ‘generosity’.
Feijóo defended the agreement on social media.
‘There is a majority of Spaniards who want change. And we will do everything they expect of us. We will achieve it with broad-mindedness and responsibility,’ he wrote.
In an apparent response to Sánchez’s criticism, he added: ‘The furious reaction of those who want to prevent it shows that we are on the right track.’ ALSO READ: PSOE considers legal action over PP video using AI to impersonate Sánchez’s wife and senior socialists.
Response to the left’s joint campaign
The PP–Vox agreement follows a separate deal bringing the PSOE together with the Frente Amplio and other progressive parties under the name Senado de Progreso, or ‘Senate of Progress’.
That alliance will contest 43 provinces and includes Izquierda Unida (IU), Sumar, r, Compromís, Más Madrid, Chunta Aragonesista and Batzarre alongside the PSOE. Its purpose is also to prevent competing candidacies from splitting support and costing the left Senate seats.
The PP had dismissed that arrangement as a ‘coalition of losers’ and accused Sánchez of abandoning the political centre.
Asked whether cooperation with Vox meant the PP was moving further to the right, Tellado argued that his party was responding to public demand for a change of government.
‘Sánchez has diluted the PSOE’s initials in a coalition, probably because he is ashamed of them. We have opted for different formulas,’ he said.
Vox vice-president Ignacio Garriga acknowledged that the two right-wing parties were ‘very different’, but argued that removing Sánchez from power took precedence. ALSO READ: A Coruña sees renewed clashes and street fires after protests over Vox rally.
He accused the prime minister of seeking to remain in office ‘one way or another’ and of attempting to ‘seize all the institutions hand in hand with extremists and radicals’.
‘Spain and democracy are at stake,’ he said.
Garriga also used the phrase ‘Sánchez’s criminal organisation’ to describe their common political opponent, saying: ‘But it is no secret that we agree on the need to expel Sánchez’s criminal organisation from all institutions, and this is what should concern and occupy us.’
Sánchez: ‘Either Spain moves forward, or the past does’
Sánchez responded with a video (see below) arguing that the agreement exposed the shared political direction of the PP and Vox.
Using blue and green – the parties’ respective colours – as a comparison, he referred to neuroscientist Patrick Mineault.
‘He discovered something very curious, which is that our brain struggles to distinguish between certain shades of blue and green. And there are those who have spent years trying to convince us that they are two very different colours,’ Sánchez said.
The prime minister argued that the parties’ positions on pensions, women’s rights and the welfare state demonstrated how closely they were aligned. ALSO READ: Spain’s main opposition party, the PP, open to working with far-right Vox if elected.
‘For years, they have tried to make us believe that they represented very different projects, but both their words and their actions make it very clear. They say the same things, vote the same way and govern together, and now they are even presenting joint Senate lists. Two colours and the same project of turning back the clock,’ he said.
His message to voters was: ‘Either Spain moves forward, or the past does.’ ALSO READ: PP and Vox strike third regional ‘national priority’ pact to form government in Castilla y León.
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Hay una mayoría de españoles que quiere cambio. Y haremos todo lo que esperan de nosotros. Vamos a lograrlo con altura de miras y responsabilidad. La reacción rabiosa de quienes quieren impedirlo demuestra que vamos en el camino adecuado.
— Alberto Núñez Feijóo (@NunezFeijoo) October 26, 2026
Dicen lo mismo. Votan lo mismo. Gobiernan juntos. Y ahora presentan listas conjuntas al Senado. PP y Vox. Un mismo proyecto político de involución. https://t.co/NtGU19UX2W
— Pedro Sánchez (@sanchezcastejon) October 26, 2026
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