It was a bet practically everyone thought Pedro Sánchez would lose. But Spain’s prime minister emerged victorious in defeat after Sunday’s snap elections, staving off what most thought would be a comfortable victory by the conservative Partido Popular (PP) and its far-right ally Vox that would have allowed them to helm the country together and brusquely steer it to the right.

Though the PP won the election, with over 8 million votes to the 7.7 million of Sánchez’s Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), the right as a whole underperformed, falling below the threshold it would have needed to form a coalition government. Instead, Sánchez now finds himself, in defiance of virtually all expectations, with the best chance of cobbling together a parliamentary majority after his party unexpectedly gained two seats and nearly a million votes more than it did in 2019 when the PSOE formed a coalition government with Unidas Podemos (United We Can), the left-wing party then led by Pablo Iglesias.

“¡No pasarán! ¡No pasarán!” chanted the crowd outside the PSOE headquarters in Madrid on election night, invoking the antifascist slogan coined during the Spanish Civil War. “Spain and all the citizens who voted have been emphatically clear,” Sánchez told his supporters. “The reactionary bloc of the Popular Party and Vox has been defeated.” Still, whether Sánchez will manage to be voted in as prime minister—and how effective a new coalition government can be—will depend on complex negotiations that may take several months.

Sánchez’s entire campaign had been framed as a bulwark against fascism from the moment he made the surprise election announcement in June, five months earlier than expected. A vote for the right and far right, he warned, could turn back the clock: “10 years…in workers’ and pensioners’ rights, 20 years in LGBTQ rights, 40 years in women’s rights, 80 years in cultural censorship.” Rather than tout his own policy achievements, Sánchez decided to appeal to voters’ discomfort with the idea of Vox entering government—an idea that has become all the more palpable since elections in late May spawned dozens of city and regional governments jointly governed by the PP and Vox.

The campaign was reminiscent of 2019, when Sánchez similarly turned to fear of the far right to appeal to voters. Yet, unlike in 2019, this time he had many more accomplishments to run on, from increases to the minimum wage, pensions, and unemployment benefits to the lowest level of joblessness since before the 2008 financial crisis and the dramatic expansion of stable employment contracts.

Following the election on Sunday, which saw an increase in voter turnout despite worries about holding an election during the summer holiday, outlets from The New York Times to the Financial Times proclaimed the results “inconclusive” and declared that “both the right and left failed to secure a clear path to forming a government.” Yet the celebratory scenes that night from the headquarters of the PSOE and Sumar (Add Up), the left-wing electoral coalition that includes Podemos and is led by Labor Minister Yolanda Díaz, suggested otherwise. “Tonight, Spain and Europe breathe easier,” Díaz told Sumar supporters. “Tonight, people will sleep easier.… The script has changed.”

The script, for both Díaz and Sánchez, has also become much more straightforward: Together, they must forge a coalition agreement and negotiate voting agreements with a slew of nationalist parties that span much of the left-right divide in order to have any chance at forming a government. Otherwise, another general election, likely in January or February, looms. All other possible scenarios—including a “grand coalition” between the PP and the Socialists—seem remote at best.

Despite the writing on the wall, PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo made a half-hearted attempt to salvage hope from the results, calling it an “anomaly” that the most-voted party in Spain would not be entitled to govern and requesting the PSOE’s help in allowing the PP to lead the country. The conservatives gained 47 deputies for a total of 136 seats in Spain’s 350-seat Congress. They will also have an absolute majority in the Spanish Senate, which may come into play in the case of a constitutional amendment or if another territorial crisis emerges, as it did in Catalonia in 2017.

Yet some anomalies appear less anomalous than others: Conservatives in recent years have formed numerous regional governments, from Andalusia in 2018 and Madrid in 2019 to Extremadura just weeks ago, without having won the election, and such a scenario is common in many parliamentary democracies. The real issue is that Feijóo’s chosen electoral partner, Vox, is unpalatable to most other parties in Spain. Unlike in 1996, when then-conservative leader José María Aznar secured votes from center-right nationalist parties in the Basque Country and Catalonia, this time around it will be nearly impossible for Feijóo to do the same, since Vox’s virulent Spanish nationalism, which the PP has not been hesitant to cater to, dramatically limits the available parliamentary arithmetic.

Meanwhile, Feijóo has good reason to fear for his political future. His underperformance relative to the opinion polls led PP heavyweights to question his leadership behind closed doors. According to reporting from El País, high-ranking officials in the PP blamed Feijóo’s underperformance on numerous errors. These included his false claim that the party had always raised pensions in lockstep with the consumer price index when in power. The resurfacing of his friendship with the infamous Galician drug trafficker Marcial Dorado also hurt Feijóo, as did his dubious response that he was not aware of Dorado’s line of work at the time. Although many thought Feijóo outperformed Sánchez during their one-on-one debate—the only one Feijóo agreed to participate in—the turning point in the election appears to have come in the last week of the campaign, perhaps signaling exhaustion with his singular focus on Sánchez rather than on his own policies and track record. According to Kiko Llaneras, one of Spain’s most established data journalists, the final opinion polls before the election gave the PP and Vox a 55 percent chance at an absolute majority; chances for a left-of-center government, by contrast, were one in six. The unlikeliest outcome happened, and, in a rare occurrence in Spain, pollsters, Llaneras said on Sunday night, almost unanimously overestimated the right-wing vote during the campaign.

Feijóo’s biggest rival for the conservative party leadership, Madrid Regional President Isabel Díaz Ayuso, received a surprise ovation on election night when the crowd at the PP headquarters interrupted Feijóo’s address with chants of “Ayuso! Ayuso!” Were Feijóo to step down and allow her to become leader of the party, the PP would most likely move even further to the right, possibly making Vox—which was founded in 2013 by disgruntled PP defectors—superfluous. Ayuso, in fact, was the architect of the PP’s rhetorical campaign against Sánchez, developing the nebulous concept of sanchismo, which suggested that Sánchez was both the puppet master of an “illegitimate,” “totalitarian” government that relied on “communists” and “terrorists” to practice “social engineering,” and the puppet of the Moroccan state, which is believed to have hacked the cell phones of Sánchez and other government officials.

Vox pursued a similar strategy against Sánchez. Yet unlike the PP, Vox lost around 600,000 votes and 19 seats from its 2019 showing. On Sunday, party leader Santiago Abascal claimed that the preelection polls had been “clearly manipulated,” tempting some into “selling the bear pelt before hunting the bear” (i.e., counting their chickens before they’re hatched). He reserved perhaps his harshest words for Feijóo, whose “whitewashing” of the PSOE was behind “the demobilization” of the right-wing vote and whose appeals to voters that they cast their ballots tactically for the PP rather than Vox, he said, had contributed to the “demonization of Vox.” Vox’s lackluster performance—polls during the campaign consistently suggested it would repeat its high watermark from four years ago—hints at a potential ceiling to the far-right vote in Spain, a ceiling that is nonetheless worryingly high: Vox got 15 percent of the vote in 2019 and only dropped to 12 percent on Sunday.

Vox and the PP have claimed for the past three-and-a-half years that Sánchez’s government was “illegitimate” because it relied on parliamentary support from Basque and Catalan nationalist parties—parties that Vox has promised to make illegal. Yet on Sunday the Spanish right learned once again that alienating the Basques and Catalans carries a heavy electoral price. While the PP and Vox combined earned about 45 percent of the vote nationally, in the Basque Country and Catalonia they barely got past 14 and 20 percent, respectively. In the Basque-speaking regions, in fact, the party most demonized by the right, the pro-independence left-wing party EH Bildu (Basque Country Gather), increased its number of deputies.