Deputies during a plenary session in Congress last February.Eduardo Parra (Europa Press)
The PP would win a hypothetical general election today with a substantially greater advantage than last July: 4.5 points compared to the meager 1.4 by which it then surpassed the PSOE.
After two months of slight falls in the popular, the March barometer of 40dB.
For EL PAÍS and SER it detects a rebound in their voting intention, mostly at the expense of Vox, which experiences a reverse evolution and suffers a significant decline of 1.2 points compared to February.
The two Government parties, PSOE and Sumar, although at a lower level than the results of the last elections, show a stable trend, even with a small recovery in the last month.
The survey was carried out between March 1 and 3, when the
Koldo case
had already broken out and with the great victory of the PP in the Galician elections still hot.
The first relevant corruption scandal faced by the Government of Pedro Sánchez apparently does not take its toll on the socialists, at least for now.
Experts in electoral sociology advise in these cases not to draw hasty conclusions because the states of public opinion can take time to decide.
40dB work.
gives the popular party a voting intention of 35.2%, eight tenths more than in February and 2.1 points above what was achieved in July.
The progress of Alberto Núñez Feijóo's formation contrasts with the sharp fall in the last month of Vox.
After starting the year with great strength, the extreme right would lose third place in favor of Sumar by falling to 10.6%, that is, 1.8 points less than its harvest at the polls last July.
As the rise of the PP is not enough to compensate for the setback of Santiago Abascal's party, the right-wing bloc as a whole gives up half a point compared to February.
Now it would gather 45.8%, slightly above – three tenths – what it added in July.
With the prospect of the last general elections, the two Government formations are suffering some wear and tear.
The PSOE would be at 31.7%, one point less than then, and Sumar at 11.1%, 1.2 points below what the polls awarded it.
But the terrible news that has occurred in the last month - the strong setback of both in Galicia and, in the case of the socialists, the discovery of the corrupt plot that profited from the sale of masks in the worst of the pandemic - does not It seems to take its toll on them at the moment.
On the contrary: they show, this month, a minimum gain of two tenths each, enough for Sumar to climb to third place.
Little young vote for the PP
For this month's barometer researchers 40dB.
They have drawn a sociological profile of the electorates of the four main political forces.
The PP shows a significant dependence on those over 65 years of age (one in three of its voters) and the upper and upper-middle classes (45% of its support).
The popular ones show problems in gaining sympathy among the youngest: they are, by far, the ones with the smallest portion of voters in the groups between 18 and 24 years old (only 4.6%, when the total population in that age group is 8.4%) and between 25 and 34 (8.9%, three points less than the general population).
The PSOE almost triples the penetration of the PP among young people: 11.3% of its supporters are under 25 years old, a percentage that is only surpassed by Vox (11.6%) and is clearly above that of Sumar (7.7% ).
No party has a younger electorate than the extreme right.
Abascal's party appears as the only one of the four that is not primarily drawn from those over 65 (the first age group among Spaniards, 26% of the total), but from the core of between 35 and 44 (close to one of every four of those who choose their ballot).
Vox is the one that depends most on low socioeconomic class voters, who contribute almost 40% of its total, five points more than the PSOE and 10 more than Sumar and PP.
And also the formation that brings together a greater part of followers who declare that they work (almost 60%, ten points more than the percentage of the total population).
Sumar's electorate is older than that of the PSOE and comes to a lesser extent than that of the socialists from the lower classes (30% compared to 35%).
Yolanda Díaz's formation achieves an outstanding echo among the unemployed, from which she draws almost one in five of her voters.
Those who declare that they have a job do not even reach 42%, 16 points less than in the case of Vox.
And how are they defined ideologically?
On a scale in which 0 would be the extreme left and 10 the extreme right, the average of Sumar's followers is 2.4;
those of the PSOE, at 3.4;
those of the PP, at 6.7;
and those of Vox, at 7.2.
On the left, those of Díaz surpass the socialists in the positions of 0 and 1, while on the right the popular ones only give up preeminence to those of Abascal in the most extreme location.
At the same time, Feijóo's party clearly wins the battle for the center over the PSOE.
27.7% of those who identify ideologically with that middle point opt for the first opposition party, compared to 16.2% who choose the one that commands the Government.
All in all, the socialists seem to be keeping at bay the flight of votes towards the PP, one of the issues that worried them most in the weeks before the last general elections.
Despite the enormous controversy over the amnesty law for those accused of the
process
- whose rejection also reaches high levels among the PSOE electorate, according to previous barometers - the work of 40dB.
It barely captures 3% of people who opted for Sánchez in July and who would now support Feijóo.
All the internal data of the survey can be consulted on the EL PAÍS and SER websites.
Data sheet:
Scope: Spain.
Universe: general population residing in Spain (except Ceuta and Melilla) from 18 years of age and with the right to vote.
Sample size: 2,000 interviews.
Quotas by sex, age, autonomous community, size of habitat and social class.
Procedure: online interview (CAWI).
Sampling error: ±2.2% (for 95% confidence).
Completion date: March 1 to March 3, 2024.