On November 10, 2019, the PP finished third in Ceuta. Vox won the seat with 11,752 votes, 35.2%; the PSOE obtained 10,455 and the PP, which has governed the city since 2001, 7,439, 22.3%. On April 28 of that same year, the deputy had been Socialist, with 13,800 votes. On July 23, 2023 he returned to being Popular, with 12,918. These are three elections with three different winners in a city of just over 80,000 inhabitants that elects a single deputy by simple majority.
The PP could be repeating in 2026 the mistakes of the November 2019 campaign, framing its narrative frame in the same space as Vox on issues key to its voters, such as immigration and border defense. The imitation of the vocabulary of the Abascal party also leads voters to confuse the identities of the two brands, resulting in the moderate being subsumed into the radical. In a city like Ceuta, for example, joining that line of argument produces a mobilizing effect on the communities most directly targeted by this message, activating a left-wing vote that had previously been demobilized by the perception of how last summer’s crisis was managed.
What happened on October 7 and 25
On October 7, in Ceuta and with Juan Jesús Vivas beside him, Alberto Núñez Feijóo said that there remain in the city “15,000 people who have irregularly invaded the city” and that “the only solution is that the 15,000 leave Ceuta and Spain”. He promised an immigration law “that would permit the immediate return of all who enter by land or by sea” and, if necessary, to resort to Article 8 of the Constitution, which is the one on the Armed Forces. On Sunday, October 25, at the end of the Women Caballas march in front of the Congress, Vivas asked “that another invasion not be repeated,” returned to talking about around 15,000 people, accused the Government of “subservience to Morocco” and closed with “Ceuta is not for sale, Ceuta defends itself.” The Government Delegation in Madrid counted about 30,000 people.
“The imitation of the vocabulary of the Abascal party also leads voters to confuse the identities of both brands, ending up subsuming the moderate within the radical”
The manifesto in the Cortes Plaza calls for reasonable things, among them a specific status in the European Union for the two cities similar to that of outer regions, and that the situation remains exceptional nobody disputes. The problem is the figure, and the Government bears part of the blame for offering five different estimates. According to Maldita’s chronology, since July 30, 72,000 people entered and 70,000 had returned by August 4; Interior counted 2,000 that day, 5,000 on August 13, and on September 21 the minister Torres added 6,000 adults and 2,000 in resources and more than 3,000 people on the street, in other words about 11,000. The city said 13,000 on September 16. The 15,000 figure that Feijóo and Vivas repeat is the one given by the president of the Sidi Embarek neighborhood association to El Faro on August 4, the night the Delegation spoke of 2,500. 75 people died according to the Ministry and 88 according to the city, and that indeed cannot have two figures.
The PP has chosen to render account of the crisis using the word “invasion,” which is Vox’s vocabulary, and with the highest figure of all, when the Government’s figure, even after corrections, already supported the magnitude. And that figure stands in contrast to a gradual reality of improvement in the most affected neighborhoods, slow but progressive, visible in the shelter resources that have taken people off the street and which the Government numbers in the emergency plan of 309 million as of September 1, 90 for security and 118 for shelter. That improvement drains the emotional core from the PP’s campaign, because its voters most affected by the crisis will continue to back Vox, which named it first, and for others the return to normality robs them of the motive. Marc López Plana asked a week ago in this outlet: “Why did Sánchez stay silent about Morocco?” and concluded that discretion in a crisis requires accountability afterwards. In this sense, the symmetric question is whose account is being given by someone who speaks with another’s words.
Tres elecciones, una regla
On April 28, 2019, Ceuta’s right arrived on three lists: Vox, with 9,092 votes; the PP, with 8,147; and Ciudadanos, with 4,546. The PSOE won the seat with 13,800. On May 26, Vox entered the Assembly with six deputies and 22.4%, and on June 15 Juan Vivas was invested with only the nine votes from the PP. On November 10, in the repeat election, with the national campaign staged at the border and around identity, Vox rose to 11,752 votes, the PP fell to 7,439 and Ciudadanos to 1,138. On May 28, 2023 the PP won the Assembly with nine seats and Vox fell to five. On July 23 the PP regained the Congress seat with 12,918 votes over Vox’s 7,752 and 1,586 more than the PSOE.
When, as in 2023, the People’s Party bets on competing for the liberal center that Ciudadanos once represented, it gains center votes and keeps anchored to its right provided that it avoids a direct entry into traditionally sensitive ethical topics. The electorate’s imagination assumes those moral stances are part of the party’s founding doctrine, and soft voters stop seeing a conservative option as a threat to social liberties.
Precisely, Ciudadanos was a victim of this strategy of direct competition on a single side of the spectrum, abandoning its socioliberal essence and confusing its brand with that of the Partido Popular, which ended up absorbing it. Between April 28 and November 10, 2019 it went from 15.9% and 57 seats to 6.8% and 10 in Spain, and in Ceuta from 4,546 votes to 1,138.
What the literature says about copying
Bonnie Meguid published in 2005 in the American Political Science Review the model political science calls asymmetric competition—the question of what happens when a large party adopts the position of a niche party on a niche issue. In Ceuta, the migratory issue had been Vox’s banner since 2019, and its standard-bearers were Carlos Verdejo and Juan Sergio Redondo, at the head of Vox’s press office in the city. At the end of November 2020, when Vox and the PP split in the city, Redondo wrote on Facebook that Vivas’s “PP brand” was what gave him votes. That is the brand the PP has stopped using since October 7.
Werner Krause, Denis Cohen and Tarik Abou-Chadi published in 2023 in Political Science Research and Methods a study with 108 electoral contexts across twelve Western European countries between 1976 and 2017 and 228 vote transfers between traditional parties and the radical right in 70 elections. They found no evidence that accommodating costs votes for the radical right, and instead that the radical right wins more where it is already consolidated, which is the case of Vox in Ceuta since 2019. The authors warn that their design is observational and that parties may copy when they are already losing. Classical Christian democratic and conservative parties have tended to be dragged toward their extremes and absorbed by them when they have not built walls to keep apart what differentiates them, creating a porous, osmotic transfer channel that always benefits the radical-right niche.
“The researchers found no evidence that accommodating reduces votes for the radical right, and indeed that the radical right gains more where it is already consolidated”
On October 19 Vox announced Redondo would be number three for Madrid, behind Abascal and Montse Lluis, and Redondo told El Pueblo de Ceuta that the city is “epicenter of our national priority.” On October 21 he designated Ana Belén Cifuentes, deputy spokesperson in the Assembly, as the congressional candidate for Ceuta. If polls predicting Vox eight or nine seats in Madrid are correct, Vox will have a Ceuta deputy no matter what happens in the district, and Cifuentes only needs to contest the seat. The PP, however, does not have that safety net. It wants to compete with a right-wing electorate mobilized by the border crisis and turned into a hard vote that will cast its ballot for whoever it believes originally represented the most effective ideology, which tends to be the populist.
What the PP has to lose by moving toward the center
On May 28, 2023 the Ceuta PP won the Assembly with 11,774 votes, 34.35%. On October 24, 2026 it approved its candidacy for November 29: Rafael Martínez Peñalver for the Congress with Health Councilor Nabila Benzina as substitute, and for the Senate the senators Abdelhakim Abdeselam and Cristina Díaz. It is a plural list because Ceuta’s vote is plural: within it are Christian conservative families and Muslim ones, and that is not captured by the image of the city from Madrid. In Ceuta the border is an economy of families. There are relatives on both sides, businesses that live off transit and marriages with two passports, and I know this from the years I worked in immigration in the city. My hypothesis is that a portion of that electorate, which the PP has attracted for twenty-five years, does not distinguish between a position on inland crossings by swimming on July 30 and a position on it. Vox makes that contrast on purpose. The PP does it unintentionally.
“In Ceuta the border is an economy of families. There are relatives on both sides, businesses that live off crossing, and marriages with two passports”
To propose drastic immigration solutions when a portion of your electorate lives from coexisting with Morocco, works on both sides of the border, or has Moroccan roots is to compete with Vox in a field where Vox has nothing to lose and the PP has everything to gain. In my view, Vox’s 7,752 votes in July 2023 can be explained almost entirely by the city’s Christian vote. The 12,918 for the PP, not so much. Every message of mass expulsion that the PP copies is a message Vox targets at its voters and that the PP directs, unintentionally, at a part of its own.
And what it activates on the left
In May 2025 the Minimum Living Income reached Ceuta for 11,138 people in 2,710 households, 4,931 of them minors, according to the INSS. It is more than 13% of the population, a proportion matched only by Melilla; in Spain, with 2.53 million people in March 2026, it is a little over 5%. In Ceuta the left mobilizes more by threat than by ideology. Vox places remigration at the center of its campaign, the PP has been calling since October 7 for the departure of 15,000 people and the two, along with Junts and UPN, blocked housing decrees on October 2. That gives the PSOE what it does not have on its own, a reason for those who stayed home on July 23, 2023 to return to the ballot out of fear. Between April and November 2019 turnout in Ceuta fell from 61.4% to 54.0% and the seat passed from PSOE to Vox. My hypothesis, which would have to be confirmed with data by district, is that that drop concentrated in lower-income neighborhoods, where PSOE is the first force. The “anti-vote” is activated by the right when it competes with itself in harshness, and of the two parties only the PP pays for it.
Nor is it a merit of the PSOE. On September 28, Miguel Ángel Pérez Triano, the government delegate and secretary-general of the party in Ceuta, resigned, and the next day Ferraz named a manager. The PSOE reaches November 29 with her, and what it gains through fear it gains without having worked for it.
“The ‘anti-vote’ is activated by the right when it competes with itself in harshness, and of the two parties only the PP pays for it”
There remains one force in the opposite direction, and I present it as a hypothesis because nobody has measured it. The crisis in July and the one in May 2021 may have activated a vote tied to defense and sovereignty, which weighs in a city with a garrison and which Feijóo sought on October 7 by invoking Article 8. But it is a vote that on November 29 also prefers the original, particularly since the original will have its seat in Madrid to talk about Ceuta.
Three exits and one forecast
If the campaign is played on Vox’s terrain, the precedent is November 10, 2019 and the seat belongs to Vox. If the PP again appears as the stable project, the precedent is July 23, 2023 and it keeps it. If the right arrives divided as on April 28, 2019 and the 2023 abstention returns out of fear, the seat could be PSOE with little more than a third of the votes, as then. The most plausible scenario is that the PP will have trouble retaining the seat because of Vox’s national push and the difficulties in differentiating its brand from the Vox brand in the City. It would be undone if the July crisis reopens in November, because the order vote would return to the City’s governing party. It will be confirmed by the first local survey with estimates, which as of October 25 no one has published.
“If the campaign is played on Vox’s terrain, the precedent is November 10, 2019 and the seat belongs to Vox”
The solution is counterintuitive, because it lies in the stability of the project rather than in the harshness of the message. The outsider matters when the classic solution does not present itself to voters as a plausible option to meet the people’s needs, and Ceuta’s PP, which was that classic solution for twenty-five years, has decided to appear disguised as an outsider. After November 29 there will be November 30, and the PP must decide whether that day the Ceuta deputy is with the PP or has been lost as a copy.
