The balance favorable to the PSOE in the transfer of voters with Unidas Podemos with respect to the last general elections has tripled, from 4.6 to 13.5 percentage points, since the first formation announced its intention to reform the criminal section of the so-called ‘only yes is yes’ law in the face of resistance from the confederate space to admit such modification.
This is reflected in the comparison between the data from the barometers of the Center for Sociological Research (CIS) for January and March, crossed by the vote recall of the respondent in the general elections of November 10, 2019. On January 30, the spokesperson for the Socialist executive, Pilar Alegría, announced at a press conference that the PSOE would present a bill to modify the rule with or without the agreement of your partner in government, to avoid future reductions in sentences for sexual offenders.
Between the January and March Barometers, the PSOE has seen its vote estimate improve by 2.5 percentage points, and Unidas Podemos, on the contrary, has witnessed how theirs has lost 4.2 points. Socialists tie his most favorable outlook of the entire legislaturewhich they already reached in November 2022, before the media scandal of the sentence reductions began, and Podemos has marked its fourth worst result since the last generals and the lowest since June 2022.
But the contrast is greater if the transfers between voters of one and another candidacy are compared. In January, 9.9% of Spaniards who in November 2019 gave their support to the list led by Pablo Iglesias (one in ten) they were going to opt in new elections for that of Pedro Sánchez, while 5.3% would have taken the opposite path. In other words, the balance favorable to the PSOE was quantified at 4.6 percentage points.
On the other hand, in the March Barometer it is revealed that the percentage of citizens who would go from Unidas Podemos to the PSOE would rise six points, to 15.9%, while that of former socialist voters who would give their vote to UP decreased to less than half and remained at 2.4%. That is the balance favorable to the PSOE has tripled from 4.6 to 13.5 percentage points.
Without being restricted to the PSOE, the fidelity of former Iglesias voters to the initials of the confederal space has gone from 68.6% of the January Barometerwhen the socialists had not yet taken action on the matter, to 49.8% in this last month. In short, 27% of the voters surveyed by the CIS who maintained their support for UP in January have refused it two months later.
