France and Spain Face to Face: Vox Does Not Vote Like the RN, the PP Is Not Macron and the PSOE Is Not the PS

We compare who votes for each party in the two countries, using the large post-election surveys of the 2024 European elections and Spain's 2023 general election. The Rassemblement National (RN) is a working-class, low-education vote with no gap between men and women; Spain's far-right Vox is over-represented among manual workers like the RN, but is much more male, younger, more Catholic and more urban. The conservative People's Party (PP) combines the religiosity of Les Républicains with the age profile of Macron's camp, and reaches more social classes than either. The Socialists (PSOE) keep an older, more female and less educated vote than the French Parti Socialiste (PS), now a party of graduates. And La France Insoumise (LFI) and Sumar, Spain's left alliance, share young people and cities, but LFI wins the poorest voters while Sumar wins graduates who describe themselves as working class.

24 October 2026 · Miguel · Leer en español

France and Spain today have two of the strongest radical rights in Europe. In the 2024 European elections, Jordan Bardella’s Rassemblement National (RN) was the most voted list in France, with 31.4%; our forecast puts Vox, Spain’s far-right party, at around 19% for the November 29 general election (29N). The two parties sit in the same group in the European Parliament, Patriots for Europe. It is tempting to think they are the same thing, and that the same goes for the rest: the People’s Party (PP), Spain’s conservative party, as Les Républicains or as Macron’s camp; the Socialists (PSOE) as the French Parti Socialiste; Sumar, Spain’s left alliance (now running as Frente Amplio), as La France Insoumise. The data say otherwise.

How we compare

The cleanest comparison is the same election in both countries on the same day: the European elections of June 9, 2024.

• France: the Ipsos post-election survey for France Télévisions and Radio France, with 8,923 people registered to vote, interviewed on June 6 and 7 (Ipsos). Its vote shares differ from the official result by little more than one point at most.
• Spain: the post-election survey of the European elections by the CIS, Spain’s state polling institute (study 3465, 3,010 interviews) and, for a larger sample, the post-election survey of the 2023 general election (study 3420, 10,101 interviews). Unless stated otherwise, the Spanish figures are those of the July 23, 2023 election (23J).

Surveys based on recalled vote do not get levels right: in the European-election study, for example, the PP comes out 8 points lower than in the ballot boxes. That is why we do not compare percentages but an index: how much a group votes for a party, compared with how much the whole sample of the same survey votes for that party. 100 is the average; 150 means that group votes for the party 50% more than average, and 50, half as much. This way a party with 31% and one with 12% can be compared by the shape of their electorate, not by their size.

The radical right: the RN and Vox

Class: both have more working-class votes, but not in the same way

The RN is, above all, a working-class vote: 54% of French manual workers who voted in the European elections chose its list (index 171), against 20% of senior managers (63). Vox is also over-represented among manual workers, even more so in relative terms: 16.6% of manual workers who voted in the 23J chose Vox, against 7.1% of managers and professionals (indices 189 and 80). The difference is one of scale: the RN is the first party among French manual workers; Vox, in Spain, is not, because the PSOE, the PP and Sumar share most of that vote.

Self-perceived class marks another difference. Among those who describe themselves as “disadvantaged”, the RN got 51% (index 162), and among the “comfortably off middle class”, 19% (60). Vox, by contrast, is below its average among those who describe themselves as working class (index 54) and around the average among the middle class (101). Vox attracts manual workers who do not identify as working class.

Education: the RN, much more marked

46% of French people without the baccalauréat (high-school diploma) voted for the RN, against 17% of those with at least three years of university: an index of 146 against 54. For Vox the difference exists but is much milder (110 against 80), and its best group is people with a high-school diploma or vocational training (126).

Sex: the big difference

The RN no longer has a gender gap: 32% of men and 30% of women vote for it (index 95 among women). Vox does: 11.7% of men and 5.9% of women voted for it in the 23J (index 66), and in the European elections 14.9% and 7.2%. In France, the male electorate of the radical right is that of Reconquête, Éric Zemmour’s party (127 among men). In this respect Vox looks more like Reconquête than like the RN.

Age: Vox, younger

The RN’s best group is aged 50 to 59 (39%, index 124), and it is below its average among those under 25 (83) and those over 70 (79). Vox is younger: index 127 among 18-to-24-year-olds, 138 among 25-to-34-year-olds, and just 57 among those over 70.

The 2024 European elections also saw the appearance of Se Acabó La Fiesta (SALF), Alvise Pérez’s anti-establishment list, with an even more extreme profile: 16% of voters aged 25 to 34, against 1% of those over 70, and almost three times as many male votes as female. It has no clear equivalent in France.

Religion: Vox, more Catholic

Among Catholics who practise regularly, the RN is below its average (index 83); its vote is stronger among non-practising Catholics (121). In France, the practising-Catholic vote on the right is split between Les Républicains (222) and Reconquête (218). Vox, by contrast, is clearly above its average among practising Catholics (148) and far below among non-believers (54).

Territory: Vox, more urban

In France the RN is more rural than urban: index 117 in municipalities of fewer than 2,000 inhabitants and 83 in conurbations of more than 200,000. Vox has no such slope: 98 in municipalities of fewer than 10,000 inhabitants and 105 in cities of more than 400,000.

In short: the RN is a working-class, low-education, middle-aged party with no gender gap and a more rural base. Vox shares the over-representation of manual workers, but is much more male, younger, more Catholic, more urban and less marked by education. It resembles the RN in the place it occupies and in its European family, less in who votes for it.

The conservatives: the PP versus Les Républicains and Renaissance

In France the centre-right is split in two: Les Républicains (LR), heir to the Gaullist right, and Macronism (Renaissance, Emmanuel Macron’s party, and its allies). In Spain, the PP occupies both spaces.

• Age. The PP shares the age profile of Macronism: index 129 among those over 70 and 69 among 18-to-24-year-olds, against 164 and 53 for Renaissance and 167 and 83 for LR.
• Religion. The PP shares the religiosity of LR: 52.7% of practising Catholics voted for the PP in 2023 (index 188), close to LR’s 222. Renaissance is at 138.
• Class. Here the PP differs from both. Renaissance is a vote of the comfortable classes: index 171 among the “comfortably off middle class” and 20 among the “disadvantaged”; 33 among manual workers. The PP reaches every class: 105 among managers and professionals and 88 among manual workers, and its vote among those earning more than €5,000 a month (122) is not as far from the average as Renaissance’s.

In this sense the PP is a centre-right party of a kind that barely exists any more in France: older, religious and drawing on all classes.

The left: the PSOE versus the PS, and Sumar versus LFI

The PSOE keeps the vote the PS lost

The French Parti Socialiste, which returned to 14% in the European elections under Raphaël Glucksmann (list PS-Place publique), is now a party of graduates: index 129 among those with at least three years of university and 71 among those without the baccalauréat; 143 among senior managers and 50 among manual workers. Among women it votes the same as among men.

The PSOE is almost the opposite. Its vote is higher among those with less education (index 124 without a high-school diploma, 91 among university graduates), among retirees (126) and among women (110): 37% of women who voted in 2023 chose the PSOE, against 30% of men. The PSOE keeps the working-class, older and female electorate that the French PS had before its collapse in 2017.

LFI and Sumar: young and urban, but not the same

La France Insoumise has the youngest profile in France: 31% of voters aged 18 to 24 chose its list (index 356), and 18% of those aged 25 to 34. It is also the party of the poorest: index 184 among households earning less than €1,250 a month and 195 among those who describe themselves as disadvantaged, and 149 in the big conurbations.

Sumar shares the youth (indices of 126 to 130 among ages 18 to 49) and the urban vote (117 in cities of more than 400,000 inhabitants), but not the vote of the poorest: it is below its average among households with less than €1,100 (88). Its distinctive feature is another: the vote of those with university education (115) and, above all, of those who describe themselves as working class (201). It is a vote of class identity rather than of income level.

What is not comparable

• Two different elections for Spain. We use the 2023 general election because its sample is three times larger; with the 2024 European elections the patterns for Vox, the PP and the PSOE repeat (for example, Vox: 157 among manual workers and 145 among practising Catholics).
• Different surveys. Ipsos interviews online with quotas; the CIS uses a different method and sample design. The categories are not identical: French and Spanish occupations are grouped in a similar way, but not the same.
• Recalled vote. Surveys after an election do not reproduce the result exactly. The index corrects for differences in level, but not for those within each group.
• Samples. Some categories have few interviews (for example, manual workers in the Spanish European-election study, 188); that is why we cite mainly the 23J study and do not report categories with fewer than 100 interviews.
• Different systems. In France, the centre has its own party and legislative elections are held in two rounds; in Spain, the PP occupies the whole centre-right. That changes who votes for whom.

What it means for the 29N

A young, male electorate like Vox’s, and even more so SALF’s, has a weakness: it votes less. In our model, first-time voters and those who did not vote in 2023 are the groups that most overstate their likelihood of going to vote. The PP and PSOE votes, being older, are safer. And the PSOE depends on a female and retiree electorate that the left in France has already lost.

How we calculated it

• France. Vote tables by category from the Ipsos post-election survey of the 2024 European elections (8,923 registered people, June 6 and 7, 2024, online quota panel), transcribed in data/francia/ipsos_pe2024_voto.csv.
• Spain. CIS microdata: study 3465 (post-election survey of the 2024 European elections) and 3420 (post-election survey of the 2023 general election). Recalled vote among those who say they voted and remember for whom, weighted with the CIS weight; categories are grouped to resemble the French ones.
• Index. Percentage of the vote for the party in the category divided by its percentage in the whole survey, times 100.
• Code. articulo_francia.py, in the altnalysis repository.