A week before campaign season formally begins, the Spanish state pollster has handed Juanma Moreno Bonilla precisely the narrative he wanted: continued ascendancy. The Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS), led by José Félix Tezanos, released its pre‑electoral estimate on Friday, projecting that Moreno’s People’s Party will on 17 May comfortably hover around the threshold of an absolute majority in the Andalusian parliament. The most probable outcome, the CIS suggests, is 55 seats for the PP, with a likely range of 51 to 59, while the Socialists of Pedro Sánchez manage only a modest recovery to 31 seats and the hard‑right Vox freezes at 13. Viewed from Seville, the figures vindicate four years of a deliberately low‑temperature regional presidency that has neutralised cultural‑war themes and kept the far right on the margins of influence without ever needing it as a formal coalition partner.

Madrid’s centre‑left replies not by attacking Moreno but by quarrelling among its own fragments. Antonio Maíllo, the veteran left‑wing leader who heads the Por Andalucía candidacy, insists the alliance he has stitched together—combining Izquierda Unida, Podemos and Sumar—marks an irreversible point of convergence for the left ahead of a future general election. Yet even as Maíllo talks of a “turning point”, the CIS numbers spotlight the persistent weakness: the combined left remains far from threatening the PP’s grip, and Vox’s stagnation suggests that the cultural polarisation on which it thrives found little traction under Moreno’s sedate management. For analysts in London who track European polling, Andalusia is emerging as a laboratory for a quiet, managerial conservatism that tames the extremes by absorbing their voters without granting them a seat at the cabinet table.

On the other side of the Continent, the equation is being reversed. Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, long relegated to the political wilderness by a cross‑party firewall, is consumed by an internal struggle over whether and how to govern. At a conspicuously publicized gathering in the Bundestag’s Paul‑Löbe‑Haus on Friday, the AfD’s parliamentary, state and European leadership held what was part strategy seminar, part televised message of intent. The guest of honour was Hubert Fuchs, a former state secretary from Austria’s Freedom Party, who came to deliver a masterclass on real‑world government—and a stinging caveat. According to accounts circulating from the closed‑door session, Fuchs warned that the party’s gravest deficit was not policy but personnel: a shortage of competent, discreet administrators capable of filling ministerial offices. From a Viennese perspective, the FPÖ knows that turning protest into power requires a cadre the AfD has yet to build.

That question of readiness is no longer abstract. In Saxony‑Anhalt, where the popular Christian Democrat Reiner Haseloff will not stand again, polls tracked by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung show the AfD leading clearly for the September state election, with a realistic—and unprecedented—chance of claiming the premiership. The CDU, which has governed the eastern state since 2002, is struggling to find a successor with comparable cross‑generational appeal, while the smaller parties hover near the electoral threshold. Seen from Berlin, the firewall that has kept the AfD out of executive power in every German Land is facing its most authentic test, and the party’s own strategic ambiguity—split between a radical grassroots that prefers opposition purity and a pragmatic wing eager to demonstrate competence—has become an acute liability.

The two geographies tell a single story about the European right’s diverging paths toward power. Andalusia suggests that when a centre‑right party projects stability, it can starve the hard right of electoral oxygen. Saxony‑Anhalt, by contrast, shows what happens when the conservative centre wobbles and the far right must contemplate the lonely burden of governing. The Austrian advice to the AfD, and Moreno’s quiet majority in the south, are opposite sides of the same coin: the transition from insurgency to administration requires not just numbers, but the organisational depth and temper that the CIS figures imply Moreno already possesses—and the AfD still visibly lacks.