Ceuta Fails to Move PSOE’s Vote, but Splits the Spanish Electorate

The Ceuta crisis has shifted the tone of Spanish politics more than its electoral arithmetic. The mass entry of migrants at the end of July has dominated the political agenda ever since. The subsequent street tensions, protests, clashes, and the city’s inability to absorb thousands of people for weeks are turning immigration into the main battleground of the early part of the new political season. The Government has had to accelerate the identification and processing of migrants and has requested support from Frontex, Europol, and the EU Asylum Agency.

Nevertheless, Ceuta has polarized Spaniards far more than it seems to have punished the PSOE. The Cluster17 poll conducted for Agenda Pública shows that the Socialist electorate maintains a clearly differentiated position on immigration without it translating, at least in this snapshot, into a significant loss of votes. Taking as an example the Cluster17 November 2025 barometer, the Socialists only fall four tenths, to 28.1%.

Consequently, it is interesting to move beyond the vote intention register. For example, the survey allows us to see what the Ceuta crisis has done to the structure of Spaniards’ preferences: in this case, the answer points toward greater polarization.

The Impact of Ceuta on the Ballots

A first step that helps interpret the survey lies in immigration, about which Agenda Pública has already offered a detailed analysis. In this sense, 40.5% of respondents believe it generates more problems than benefits, compared with 29.7% who hold the opposite view and 27.9% who perceive a balanced impact. All of this in a context where the migration issue has become a line of social and electoral division, both at the Spanish and European levels.

The Socialist electorate maintains a clearly differentiated position on immigration without translating, at least in this snapshot, into a significant loss of votes

Nevertheless, that division, instead of centering on a single party — PSOE or Vox, for example — increases the distance between left- and right-leaning electorates. Among those who say they voted for the PSOE in 2023, the perception of immigration is substantially more favorable than in the overall sample. Half consider that it generates more benefits than problems, while just over one in ten believes it generates more problems than benefits. In Sumar, the distance is even greater. By contrast, among voters for the PP the relationship reverses clearly and among Vox voters hardly any ambivalence remains: the vast majority considers that immigration generates more problems than benefits.

That is, the Ceuta crisis has not turned immigration into a cross-cutting problem that punishes the Government equally. The result, however, is to make more visible that Spaniards are looking at the same event from completely different political positions.

Ceuta has not managed to turn immigration into a cross-cutting problem that punishes the Government equally

The PSOE, moreover, is not competing in the terrain that most favours Vox. Its response has combined border control, administrative management, and a humanitarian dimension. The Government has reinforced police identification and triage devices, has dispatched additional personnel to speed up asylum requests and has requested support from Frontex, Europol, and the EU Asylum Agency to process cases and facilitate returns when legally appropriate. Additionally, on August 25 it declared the situation of national security interest and created a single command to coordinate the actions of the various ministries and administrations.

That response, however, has also faced criticism for its slow start and for its coordination during the first weeks. Alberto Bueno noted in Agenda Pública that the Government took almost a month to activate the mechanisms of the National Security Law and questioned that, if a single command was necessary by the end of August, it had not been established at the beginning of the crisis. In this context, the electoral situation is peculiar: the PSOE may suffer wear due to its handling of Ceuta without necessarily losing votes for not hardening its immigration stance. Its electorate does not appear to be demanding that it turn into Vox: half of Socialist voters highlight its benefits, 37.4% indicate a balanced impact and only 10.9% give a negative assessment.

On the opposition side, the PP occupies a different position. The crisis is an opportunity to challenge the PSOE’s control narrative, but it also brings the Populars closer to the political frame that for years has belonged almost exclusively to Vox. The competition between the two parties thus shifts toward a question on which right-wing radical parties tend to have an edge: the more immigration is framed as a threat, the easier it is for these parties to argue that conventional solutions have failed.

The political response to Ceuta itself lends support to this hypothesis. Vox has used the crisis to push a maximally hardline discourse, while the PP has also toughened its stance and has turned the government’s management of the emergency into one of the main arguments against Sánchez. In other words, immigration has moved from a public policy issue to functioning as a political identity proxy.

That is the main distinction between a case of polarization and a realignment. There is currently insufficient evidence to claim that a Socialist voter has abandoned the PSOE as a result of Ceuta and shifted to the PP, Vox, or abstention. But there is no doubt that different electorates have interpreted the same crisis through their preexisting political identities.

Different electorates have interpreted the same crisis through their preexisting political identities

All this has consequences for 2027. In scenarios like the current one, an election does not require a single issue to trigger large electoral shifts to be decisive. It is enough if it manages to organize the contest around a dimension that favors one of the blocs. Therefore, if immigration becomes one of the main concerns of citizens, Vox starts with a narrative advantage because it has spent years building its identity around that issue.

In this case, that possibility brings significant risks for the conservatives. If the Feijóo-led camp competes with Vox in terms of hardness, they may reinforce the centrality of the issue without necessarily absorbing all the critical votes on immigration. And the risk for the PSOE is different: it may retain its electorate, but find itself increasingly isolated on an issue that mobilizes strongly a segment of the country.

Europe and the Ceuta crisis seen from Catalonia

The Ceuta crisis also introduces a territorial dimension. In Catalonia, migrant backlash could find its own political translation. Aliança Catalana, the radical-right and pro-independence formation led by Silvia Orriols, appears in the survey with a notably stronger presence in Catalonia, but with the possibility of entering Congress if it ran in the general elections. This is important because it shows that migratory polarization is not limited to the Spanish left-right axis but can combine with territorial, cultural, and identity conflicts to produce new electoral offerings.

The European experience shows that anti-immigration parties tend to prosper especially when they manage to transform a concrete public-management issue into a perceived threat to security, identity, or the State. That is, for various reasons, the breeding ground that the Ceuta crisis provides. The difference is that, for the moment, Spain still has an electoral structure in which the PSOE seems to retain a very stable electorate regarding immigration positions.

Ceuta has not yet changed the electoral map, but it has caused changes in the map of polarization.

The pan-European polling firm Cluster17 has established itself as one of the most accurate in Spain. Its 2023 general election poll was the second most accurate in votes and the third in seats, according to Electomanía. In 2024, with the survey published in Agenda Pública, it achieved the most precise estimate of the Catalan elections and, again with this outlet, the third most accurate in the global ranking of seats and votes in the European elections.