The Canary Islands Under the Microscope: Two New Coalitions, Vox in Tenerife and the Eighth Seat in Las Palmas

The Canary Islands arrive at November 29 with a slate of options unlike 2023's. Coalición Canaria runs with Primero Canarias, the municipalist splinter of Nueva Canarias, under the 1ºCan-CC label. Nueva Canarias, Podemos, IU and Sumar run together as Unidad del Pueblo Canario. And Vox, which had no list in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 2023, is back on the ballot. With the real slate, the central scenario gives Las Palmas PP 2, PSOE 2, Vox 2, Unidad del Pueblo Canario 1 and 1ºCan-CC 1, and Tenerife PSOE 3, PP 2, Vox 1 and 1ºCan-CC 1. But in both provinces the last seat is close to a coin flip.

31 October 2026 · Miguel · Leer en español

A new slate

The two Canary provinces elect 15 deputies: 8 in Las Palmas (Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura) and 7 in Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Tenerife, La Palma, La Gomera and El Hierro). In 2023 they split as follows: PSOE 6, PP 6, Vox 1, Sumar 1 and Coalición Canaria 1.

For November 29, according to the candidacies published on October 28, pending final proclamation on November 3, the slate changes in three ways:

• 1ºCan-CC. Coalición Canaria is running with Primero Canarias, the party founded in 2025 by mayors who left Nueva Canarias, and with 18 local groups. The lists are headed by Teodoro Sosa in Las Palmas and Cristina Valido in Tenerife. There is no pact with the PP.
• Unidad del Pueblo Canario. Nueva Canarias, Podemos, IU and Movimiento Sumar run together, with Luis Campos (NC) in Las Palmas and Marisol Collado (Sumar) in Tenerife. Neither Frente Amplio nor Podemos has its own list in the Canary Islands.
• Vox in both provinces. In 2023 Vox had no list for Congress in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, after several candidates withdrew. In 2019 it had won a seat there with 53,491 votes.

When CC and NC add up, Las Palmas yields a seat

Coalición Canaria’s recent history follows a simple rule. In Tenerife it has won a seat in every general election since 2008. In Las Palmas it has won one only when running in coalition with Nueva Canarias: in 2011 and in November 2019. When they ran separately, in 2008, April 2019 and 2023, neither reached a seat in Las Palmas.

In 2023, CC won 33,558 votes in Las Palmas and Nueva Canarias 42,430. Together they would have beaten Sumar, which took the eighth seat. This time they are not running together, but 1ºCan-CC includes Primero Canarias, which took a good share of NC’s mayors. How much of NC’s vote follows those mayors is the big unknown in the province, and no poll has measured it. Our model assumes half, and we flag it as an assumption to revisit.

The forecast, province by province

• Las Palmas. PP, PSOE and Vox are all but assured of two seats each. The PSOE wins a third in 51% of simulations and the PP in 36%. The last two seats are contested between the PSOE’s or the PP’s third, Unidad del Pueblo Canario (at least one in 55% of simulations) and 1ºCan-CC (51%). Vox is the novelty: with an average of 21.5%, it wins two seats in 72% of cases, against its single seat in 2023.
• Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Six seats are fairly clear: two for the PP, two for the PSOE, one for 1ºCan-CC (at least one in 95%) and one for Vox (97%). The seventh is open. The PSOE takes it in 31% of simulations, the PP in another 31%, Unidad del Pueblo Canario in 24% and 1ºCan-CC in 13%.

The only published poll with seats by Canary province, Sigma Dos for El Mundo on October 26, gives Las Palmas PP 3, PSOE 3 and Vox 2, and Tenerife PP 3, PSOE 2, Vox 1 and CC 1. It agrees with our forecast on Vox and on CC in Tenerife. It differs in Las Palmas, where it gives a seat to neither CC nor Unidad del Pueblo Canario. That is a difference of one seat per province, within the margins of both.

How the forecast changes with the real slate

Until today, the model allocated the Canary vote using the 2023 slate. With the 2026 slate, two seats change. In Las Palmas, 1ºCan-CC gains one that the PSOE was losing. In Tenerife, Vox gains the one that the PP had. Across Spain as a whole, Coalición Canaria goes from one seat to two in the central scenario, and the probability that PP and Vox together reach an absolute majority does not move: 94%. With CC, 95%.

The Senate, island by island

In the Senate each island is a constituency: three senators in Gran Canaria and in Tenerife, one in each of the other five. Two things change from 2023. Under the PP–Vox agreement of October 26, Vox is not running a Senate list in the Canary Islands and the PP includes an independent proposed by Vox in Gran Canaria and in Tenerife. And the joint PSOE–Frente Amplio list, which runs in much of Spain, does not run in the Canary Islands: Unidad del Pueblo Canario runs its own list on six islands.

• Gran Canaria and Tenerife. The most likely outcome is PP 2 and PSOE 1: in 94% of simulations in Gran Canaria and 76% in Tenerife. In Tenerife the reverse split, PSOE 2 and PP 1, occurs in 20%. Vox’s vote, with no list of its own, goes mostly to the PP.
• Lanzarote, Fuerteventura and La Palma. The PP is the favorite in all three, at 69%, 68% and 86%. In Fuerteventura, 1ºCan-CC wins in 30% of cases.
• La Gomera and El Hierro. The island parties, Agrupación Socialista Gomera and Asamblea Herreña Independiente, win in a little more or a little less than half of cases, with the PP very close. These are the two islands with the least data and the most uncertainty in the model.

By municipality

How we calculated it

• Slate. Candidacies published on October 28 (research_notes/canarias_29n.md). It will be revised with the BOE proclamation of November 3.
• Canary assumptions in the model. Unidad del Pueblo Canario inherits Sumar’s vote and half of Nueva Canarias’s from 2023. The other half goes to 1ºCan-CC, via Primero Canarias. Vox starts in Tenerife from 43,900 votes: its 2019 votes scaled by its national decline between 2019 and 2023, subtracted 85% from the PP, which was the party that picked up that vote in 2023. Both assumptions are detailed in the model specification.
• Senate. Scenario of the PP–Vox agreement of October 26, with the fraction of Vox’s vote that goes to the PP treated as uncertain (between 55% and 85%).
• Forecast. 50,000 simulations of the October 31 forecast. Municipalities are computed from the 2023 split by municipality and the municipal noise estimated in the 2008 to 2023 general elections.
• Code. pronostico.py, senado_pronostico.py and articulo_circ.py, in the altnalysis repository.