Pedro Sánchez faces this political autumn four imminent corruption trials to your circle of trust. In an unprecedented situation, her State Attorney General already has a date to sit on the bench, her brother is waiting for her, his wife is clinging to resources to try to avoid her and her former lieutenants in the PSOE are waiting their turn between UCO reports. The crimes for which they are being investigated range from the collection of illegal commissions to the payment of parties, feasts and prostitutes with black money, through the use of institutions for political benefit and personal gain, and ending in influence peddling. And they all share a common denominator: the crimes were only possible because those who allegedly committed them were people close to the president.
One might think that there is no political leader who can endure such wear and tear, not even if Machiavelli had been reincarnated as the genie of Ferraz’s lamp. But it turns out that in the surveys that have been published since the return of the summer, the PSOE not only does not suffer new declines in voting intention, but rather it gains support and, in some cases, points to a recovery.
How is it possible? The Government has promoted its own trap surveys to fuel the possibility of a comeback, adding a recent one by Iván Redondo to the Tezanos parish sheet every month. And at the same time it has deployed its entire arsenal against reports of corruption, disdaining the reports and assuming that they no longer affect the game, as if the public had already been satisfied with the previous installments and did not want to see the new seasons of the series.
It is still a broad plan, as seen last week with the arguments to justify the rush of envelopes in Ferraz. But can it work? Is the PSOE really in a position to win the elections or continue governing despite everything? Is it true that corruption no longer impacts the electorate? Let’s see.
IS THE PSOE REALLY GOING UP IN THE SURVEYS?
The first thing is to see what we are talking about when it is stated that the PSOE is recovering. There are two surveys that place him in the lead, the aforementioned Tezanos and Redondo, neither of which should be taken seriously. Its objective is what it is: to draw a scenario that has not yet occurred so that it begins to look like it can occur. The self-fulfilling prophecy. Namely: that the rise of Vox and the collapse of Sumar subtract enough votes from the PP and give the necessary votes to the PSOE, respectively, so that Sánchez can win the elections.
Actually, none of the polls that the media publish on a recurring basis contemplate something like this at this time. Certainly, the PSOE has risen in all of them in the last two months, but in most of them it has risen by just a few tenths. There has not even been enough continuity to affirm that there is an upward trend.
In the Sigma Dos report that we publish every month, the latest data for the PSOE has been a pyrrhic rise of two tenths. And if the evolution of the party is analyzed since the last general elections in July 2023, the line is a permanent decrease, from 31.7% then to 27.2% currently. It had its worst moment this summer, at 26.7%, and has only recovered very slightly since then.
Regarding corruption, it is difficult to assess its influence because the trickle of reports, cases, accusations, statements and judicial orders is constant. In the first half of 2024, when the Koldo casethe voting intention of the PSOE remained relatively stable, which could mean that it was not particularly affected, but equally Pedro Sánchez’s five-day scare did not serve as a trigger for reflection.
The reality is that The demographic situation of the PSOE is very bad. Today he would have no chance of governing in any poll or of winning the elections. It is another thing to think that it should be worse, but that is another debate.
DO YOU HAVE MARGIN TO RECOVER?
The main political tool of the PSOE continues to be polarization, used to keep the ideological blocs immobile and to ensure that there are no transfers of votes from left to right. This means that the support that Sánchez has lost is not so much in other parties as in indecision, where he has 18% of his 2023 electorate. There are 1.4 million votes that the PSOE believes that, if they have not already been lost with everything that has happened, they will no longer leave. The challenge is to mobilize them, more with fear of the other than with their own hope, and to increase their intention to vote for socialists as the elections approach.
If, for example, you compare the PSOE data with that of Vox, you can clearly see the difference. Abascal’s electorate is hypermobilized and only has 2.1% undecided. This means that its only margin to continue growing is to take votes from others, something that is currently focused on the PP. The PSOE, on the other hand, does not attack the forces of its bloc, but rather polarizes with the right. He takes support from Sumar, but Its fundamental objective is not to take votes from other parties, but to mobilize its own.
AND THERE IS NO LEFT-RIGHT TRANSFER OF VOTES?
Bit. In Spain the votes of the old proletarian left have not gone to the populist right, as has partly happened in France, Germany, Italy or the United States. At the national level, the percentages of transfer between ideological blocs are low. According to our latest Sigma Dos survey, the PP captures 5.8% of the PSOE, but Vox barely manages to take anything away from it (0.5%) and even less from Sumar (0.2%).
The scenario that both the PP and Vox are considering is that this transfer of votes from the left will occur, both due to corruption and due to the issues that are growing in the concerns of Spaniards: housing and immigration in the first place, but also insecurity, the deterioration of public services, the worsening of the domestic economy, fiscal pressure and generational inequality.
In the survey that we published for the Diada in Catalonia, where housing and immigration have impacted society in a more intense way, a greater dance between blocks was observed. It is true that the Catalan scenario is particular because two ideological axes overlap, the right-left and the independence-constitutionalist, but the results were still striking.
Support for Aliança Catalana was especially transversal, a party identified as far-right but capable of taking votes from ERC (9.9%), the CUP (4.4%), En Comú (4.3%) and the PSC (3.7%).
Vox, for its part, achieved here what it does not achieve at the national level, capturing votes from the PSC (2.1%) and En Comú (1.7%). And the PP also scraped the PSC (3.8%) and En Comú (1.7%).
AND THEN CORRUPTION DOESN’T MATTER?
It is indisputable that there are many current issues, both real and fabricated, and that those related to the economy, such as housing, have a determining weight in voting intention due to their enormous social impact. We must not forget, for example, that The PP obtained an absolute majority in 2011 after the Gürtel casebecause citizens prioritized the dramatic economic situation that Zapatero had left over corruption. And In 2015 and 2016 he won the elections again after the Bárcenas papers, Rato’s arrest and everything else.
In the latest CIS barometer, the main concerns of the Spaniards whom Tezanos asks, who are quite leaning to the left, are housing (30.4%) and immigration (20.7%). Corruption appears in ninth place, but in the classification there are other categories that can blur the result, such as “bad behavior of politicians” (fourth place), “political problems” (fifth) or “Government and parties” (seventh).
The evolution, furthermore, points to a significant growth of concern about corruption, which has gone from 5.9% in September 2024 to 10.9% in September 2025, almost double.
Very recently, the European Union echoed this worsening perception of corruption in Spain. It highlighted that it had lost 10 places in the international ranking in a single year and that it had suffered a constant deterioration in the last five years, which covers almost the entire period of Sánchez’s government.
Of course, this concern goes by neighborhood. When the PP governments were affected by cases of corruption, left-wing voters were much more concerned than right-wing voters, and now the opposite is true. There is a voter captive to ideology and partisanship who will always vote for his own, even if it is with his nose covered.. The best data to measure them is voting loyalty, which in the case of the PSOE is 67%, a very low figure.
Many other citizens show real concern about corruption, institutions and the rule of law, and many more cannot tolerate seeing black money squandered on parties while taxes are constantly raised. There are also derivatives such as the female vote, which is punishing the PSOE in the midst of a parade of prostitutes in the Koldo case.
Elections are won or lost by a combination of factors and those that are close are decided in the last weeks or even days. But The impact that corruption continues to have on Spanish society should not be underestimated. and, above all, the one he will have when he sees José Luis Ábalos, Santos Cerdán, Koldo García, Begoña Gómez, David Sánchez and Álvaro García Ortiz sitting on the bench.