Win Madrid, Lose Brussels: Why a Centre-right Victory in Spain Could Cost the EPP its Partners in Europe

There are two Pedro Sánchezes. In Brussels, he has spent the past two years as the most visible exception to Europe’s rightward drift: he was the only NATO leader to reject the 5% defence spending target, he is one of the EU’s sharpest critics of Donald Trump, he has recognised Palestine and is the most prominent leader defending a clearly progressive approach to migration. In Spain, the mood is very different. Sánchez has not passed a new budget since 2023, his former right hand man has been sentenced to 24 years in prison for corruption, and he is widely perceived as having mishandled the Ceuta migration crisis. It is the second Sánchez who called the election for 29 November. But it is the first that Brussels stands to lose.

For almost four decades, the European Parliament has been run by an alliance between the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) and the centre-left Socialists and Democrats (S&D). Most EU laws pass with the votes of both. The two groups have also usually shared the Parliament’s presidency, kept the far right out of its top posts and supplied the votes to elect Commission presidents – most recently Ursula von der Leyen.

But since the 2024 elections, the EPP has had an alternative. Between Georgia Meloni’s ECR, the Patriots and the AfD-led Europe of Sovereign Nations, there are enough votes to its right to pass laws without the socialists. The EPP has used this selectively, but on issues that matter. In effect, the EPP now runs two majorities: one with the right on migration and deregulation, another with the socialists whenever it needs a reliable pro-European majority. Europe’s socialists now belong to a majority that increasingly governs without them.

Yet they have stayed: defending the Commission, voting for compromises they dislike and tolerating the EPP’s turns to the right, because there was still much to protect, above all left-of-centre governments back in the member states, Sánchez’s Spain chief among them. 

If the polls are right, Sánchez will be replaced by Alberto Núñez Feijóo of the centre-right Partido Popular, governing with the support of the hard-right Vox Party, whose leader presides over the Patriots (the European alliance of Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán). The socialists would be left without a leader of any of the EU’s five largest member states. A group with so little left to protect has little reason to hold its fire.

Stepping away from the historic centrist alliance and effectively going into opposition, would not mean voting against everything. But, it would mean ceasing to be the EPP’s default partner, and daring the EPP to govern with the right.

First, the Commission would lose its guaranteed pro-EU majority. The EPP would have to choose between a standing alliance with the right and a higher price for socialist support on each law.

Second, the socialists’ leverage would be highest where the right cannot help. The Patriots and the AfD’s group will help the EPP cut red tape and tighten migration rules, but they will always want to vote against most things that build Europe: a larger budget, trade agreements, aid to Ukraine, enlargement. On those files the socialists could name their price, and at the present time nothing matters more to the Commission than the 2028-2034 budget. It is von der Leyen’s last chance to reshape EU spending, and it needs the consent of a majority of all MEPs. 

None of this is certain. The EPP still votes with the socialists more often than with the far right, and the S&D has threatened to walk out before, only to settle for cosmetic concessions. And the EPP itself has shown another way. Having helped launch the Green Deal, it spent the run-up to the 2024 elections campaigning against much of it. The socialists, who are losing ground in the polls for the 2029 European elections, may borrow from that playbook: staying in the majority while campaigning against it.

For business, the centrist alliance has been Brussels’ quiet guarantee: whatever the Commission proposed, the centre would eventually deliver something workable. Without it, majorities will be assembled file by file, by margins thin enough for one national delegation to tip the result; the Mercosur deal, for example, was sent to the Court of Justice by ten votes. Companies will need coalitions that reach beyond the EPP and the socialists, and will have to learn to treat committee deals as provisional until fully confirmed by plenary votes. Adopted laws will more frequently be reopened. 

If Sanchez loses, the first major signal and implication of what route the S&D take may come as early as January, when MEPs elect a new president, a post promised to the socialists.