Spain’s conservative People’s party has won a resounding majority in the regional elections in Andalucía, in an unprecedented win that frees it from relying on the far-right Vox party to govern in the country’s most populous region. With 99% of polling stations in the southern Spanish region reporting, the PP, in opposition nationally, had received 58 seats – three more than the 55 needed for a majority. It is the party’s best-ever result in the region. “We’ve made history in Andalucía,” the PP’s leader in the region, Juanma Moreno, declared on Sunday night. The result was more than double the 26 seats the party won in the 2018 election. Vox received 14 seats, adding two more to its 2018 breakout result when it became the first far-right group to triumph at the ballot box since Spain’s return to democracy. The gains stood in sharp contrast to the waning Ciudadanos (Citizens) party, in government as the junior partner in the PP-led coalition. It failed to win a single seat in the snap regional election. The left also took a drubbing, with the Socialists, who are in power nationally, winning 30 seats – down three from 2018, their previous worst-ever result in the region – while far-left groupings Por Andalucía and Adelante Andalucía won a combined seven seats, compared with 17 in 2018. “The big failure here belongs to the left bloc,” said Juan Montabes Pereira, a political science professor at the University of Granada, citing a lack of recognisable leadership, fragmentation among the parties on the left and polling that suggests Andalusians have shifted slightly to the right in recent years. “This is a blow to the Socialists who until 2018 had governed the region for 37 years.” The win was a show of strength for the new PP leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who has sought to distance himself from the far right and portray the party as a moderate alternative “I know this speech might sound boring or old-fashioned but I’m sorry, I believe politics isn’t a fashion show or reality show,” Feijóo said during a recent rally. The vote hinted at the scale of the challenge the country’s Socialists, led by Pedro Sánchez, face as they prepare for national elections due by the end of 2023. The loss in their former stronghold of Andalucía follows losses to the PP in previous regional elections in Madrid and Castilla y León. “Sanchez might face an uphill battle to get re-elected” next year, Antonio Barroso, an analyst at political consultancy Teneo told AFP, pointing to voter concerns about inflation as the central government struggles to contain economic fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Polls leading up to the election had suggested the PP would fall short of a majority, forcing it to rely on Vox. While the far-right party had previously supported the PP-led coalition from the outside, this time around – likely emboldened by its recent, unprecedented entry in the region of government of Castilla y León – Vox had insisted its support would have to be tied to its participation in a coalition government Moreno, the PP leader in Andalusia, responded by calling on voters to allow him to govern solo, said Paloma Román, a politics professor at Madrid’s Complutense University. “Juanma Moreno is going to sleep wonderfully tonight.” Vox, which ran on a campaign that targeted irregular immigrants, anti-bullfighting campaigners and feminists, still managed to increase its seat count by two. The far-right party’s candidate in Andalucía, Macarena Olona, was banking on a backlash to a raft of recent feminist measures passed in Spain, describing plans for menstrual leave as “insulting” to her as a woman and insisting that young women in the country receive more help for abortions than raising a family. “The slight increase in seats is not the result they were hoping for,” said Román, pointing to polls that had suggested the party could win as many as 20 seats in the region. “In technical terms, it seems their growth has slowed.”