Huesca, the Province That Votes Like Spain: Its Third Seat Is a Coin Flip Between the PP and Vox

Since 2008, the party with the most votes in Huesca has always been the party with the most votes in Spain. For November 29, our model gives one seat to the conservative People's Party (PP) and one to the Socialists (PSOE), and leaves the third as a coin flip: Vox wins it in 49% of simulations and the PP in 47%. Town by town, the PP starts as the favorite in 158 of 202 municipalities.

21 October 2026 · Miguel · Leer en español

We are starting our daily series on Spain’s 52 electoral districts with one that works like a thermometer. Huesca, in the Pyrenees of northeastern Spain, elects three members of Congress; more than half of its 202 municipalities have fewer than 250 registered voters, and in all seven general elections held since 2008, the party with the most votes in the province has also been the party with the most votes nationwide. It is one of the three provinces of Aragon, a region sometimes called Spain’s Ohio for how well it tracks the national result.

Seven elections, seven hits

With three seats, the outcome almost always comes down to the third one. Spain allocates seats with the D’Hondt method, and here the math is simple: the first party gets a seat and the second party gets one; the third seat goes to the first party if half of its vote is larger than the third party’s vote, and to that third party if not. In 2023, half of the PP’s vote (19.1%) comfortably beat Vox (12.6%), so the PP won two seats. In 2015, 2016 and April 2019, with Podemos or Ciudadanos above 15%, the third seat went to them. Only once in six elections did the seat split stay the same, from 2015 to 2016.

The forecast: a coin-flip seat

The model gives the PP 36% of the vote in Huesca (between 27% and 45% with 95% probability), the PSOE 28% (20–36%) and Vox 18% (13–25%). Compared with 2023, the PP and the PSOE are down and Vox is up about six points. Expected turnout is 75% (69–80%), five points higher than in 2023.

With those numbers, the third-seat rule is on a knife’s edge: half of the PP’s vote (18%) and Vox’s vote (18%) are virtually tied. Vox wins a seat in 49% of simulations and the PP takes a second one in 47%; the PSOE does in 4%. In half of the simulations, the margin that decides that seat is under 4,300 votes. The PP’s first seat and the PSOE’s are all but certain (100% and 99%).

Town by town

The 2023 map is almost the mirror image of 2019’s: in November 2019 the PSOE won 129 municipalities and the PP 67; in 2023, the PP won 135 and the PSOE 65. Between those two elections, one in three municipalities (70 of 202) changed hands. The swing was across the board: among the 10 municipalities with more than 2,000 voters, the PP went from winning 3 to winning 9, and among the 113 with fewer than 250, from 41 to 73. Since 2008, 150 municipalities have changed winning party at least once, although some of those changes reflect the fact that from 2011 to 2016 the PP ran on a joint ticket with the regional Aragonese Party (PAR).

For 2026, the municipal estimate makes the PP the favorite in 158 municipalities (21 solid, 104 leaning and 33 toss-ups), the PSOE in 43 (1, 26 and 16) and Vox in one, a toss-up. In all, 50 municipalities are toss-ups. Compared with 2023, 25 would change hands, almost all from the PSOE to the PP (22).

In the 10 municipalities with the most voters, the PP is the favorite in all of them, with nuances: in Fraga, Tamarite de Litera and Graus it is above 95%; in the city of Huesca and in Jaca, which was decided by less than a point in 2023, it is only leaning; and in Sabiñánigo, which the PSOE won in 2023, the estimate is a toss-up.

Lead: points over the runner-up in 2023. "First in": share of 4,000 simulations in which the favorite finishes first in the municipality.

These maps should be read for what they are: an estimate. It starts from each municipality’s 2023 vote, shifts it just enough for the province as a whole to match the forecast, and adds a local error, larger the smaller the municipality, calibrated on how much local votes have moved relative to the provincial vote in past general elections. It knows nothing about local candidates or what is going on in each village, and in a town of 100 voters a handful of votes can change the winner. That is also why we do not go down to individual polling stations: with so few votes per station, the map would be mostly noise.

Who votes in Huesca

Huesca has 234,361 residents spread over 15,641 square kilometers (about 6,000 square miles): 15 people per square kilometer, compared with 99 for Spain as a whole. One in five residents (22%) lives in a municipality of fewer than 1,000 people; in Spain, three in 100 do. The pyramid is narrower between ages 15 and 45 and wider from 60 on: 31% of the population is 60 or older (28% in Spain), and there are 191 people aged 65 and over for every 100 under 15, compared with 171 nationwide.

Three features help explain how it votes:

• The weight of farming. 15% of workers are employed in agriculture, four times the national share, and industry also weighs more than average (16% vs. 14%); services, much less (60% vs. 76%).
• An older population, but not a poor one. Income per person (€16,090) is slightly above Spain’s, and unemployment is lower. What sets Huesca apart is not income but age and dispersion: fewer young adults and many people in small villages.
• A large foreign population that does not vote. 17% of residents are foreign citizens, above the Spanish average (15%). They cannot vote in general elections unless they have become Spanish citizens, so the electorate is even older than the population.

How we calculated it

• History. Official Congress results (Spain’s Official Gazette, BOE) from 2008 to 2023, grouped by party family. Municipal results come from the Interior Ministry’s polling-station files; adding the vote from Spaniards abroad, they match the official totals exactly in all seven elections.
• Provincial forecast. altnalysis’s October 20 forecast: 4,000 of its 50,000 simulations for Huesca.
• Municipal estimate. In each simulation, each municipality’s 2023 vote is shifted party by party, on a logistic scale, until the provincial total (excluding the overseas vote, which is held at its 2023 split) matches the simulation; then a municipal error is added with variance a + b / voters, fitted on changes between the 2015 and 2023 general elections. Solid: the favorite finishes first in at least 95% of simulations; leaning, between 60% and 95%; toss-up, below 60%.
• Demographics. INE (Spain’s statistics office): Continuous Population Statistics (July 1, 2026, provisional), Household Income Distribution Atlas (2024), 2021 Census and Labor Force Survey (second quarter of 2026). Municipal boundaries: es-atlas (from Spain’s National Geographic Institute).
• Code. articulo_circ.py 22, in the altnalysis repository.