Spaniards have eight weeks to decide whether Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez should extend his eight-year tenure, or make way for a right-wing administration that could dramatically change the national trajectory — not least because it could include the far-right Vox party.

Here, POLITICO breaks down the main factors that will shape the Nov. 29 snap election.

The immediate spark may have been nationwide housing protests, but the race will also be shaped by Spain’s political extremes, the unresolved migrant crisis in Ceuta and geopolitics in the age of Trump.

Here are five things to watch.

Kingmakers on the extremes

Spain’s two largest parties — Sánchez’s center-left Socialist Party and Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s center-right People’s Party — are expected to get roughly the same results as they did when voters went to the polls in 2023, with both falling short of a governing majority. That means the next government will be led by whoever can cobble together the largest parliamentary alliance.

Polls put the People’s Party at around 34 percent, ahead of Sánchez’s Socialists, who are backed by 26% of voters. PP leader Feijóo says he is comfortable governing with the far-right Vox party, which is polling at around 18 percent, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls. The PP already governs alongside Vox in several regions.

Sánchez’s hopes of reelection hinge on pulling off the same unlikely feat he achieved three years ago, when he managed to form a parliamentary majority with far-left, regional and separatist forces.

This time around, that option appears to be out of reach as a result of the collapse of the country’s left-wing political forces. Sumar — the junior partner in Sánchez’s coalition government — has plummeted in the polls and is currently leaderless.

Health Minister Mónica García is among the frontrunners to head the new alliance, which plans to present itself as the “Broad Front” later this month. It will be up to its eventual leader to try to forge a viable left-wing electoral alliance with bitter rivals Podemos, as well as big personalities like housing activist and former Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau.

Appetite for Vox

Over the past decade, the far-right Vox party has evolved from a fringe group into a major political force — and, now, a plausible coalition partner in a national PP government.

In contrast to when national elections were last held in Spain, Vox has a clear track record of teaming up with the PP at the local and regional levels. The two parties currently govern together in Extremadura, Aragón, Castilla y León and Andalusia, and previously ruled in Valencia and Murcia.

Within those governments, Vox has successfully pressured the PP into adopting tougher migration policies and denouncing European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s Green Deal. Some PP-Vox governments have also replaced policies on violence against women with a broader “intra-family” framing that waters down the gender-specific nature of such crimes, and rolled back LGBTQ+ protections.

In 2023, Sánchez used the prospect of a PP-Vox government to spook voters into backing his candidacy, but it looks less likely that strategy can pack such a punch this time. Vox has expanded its political representation in several elections over the past three years, suggesting the party may no longer carry the same electoral stigma.

But the PP will nonetheless have to tread lightly. Although its clearest path to power involves a coalition with Vox, saying so may turn off moderate voters. The worse the center-right party performs, the more power its eventual far-right partners will have to determine policy.

The open wounds

There are two unresolved issues that could shake up the election: the Ceuta migration crisis and the ongoing corruption cases involving members of Sánchez’s inner circle.

Thousands of migrants remain in Ceuta after a mass surge that prompted major questions about Spain’s security readiness and its tense relationship with Morocco. While the recent housing protests have momentarily distracted voters, attention on the crisis could return as judicial investigations produce new findings detailing the government’s handling of the event.

King Felipe VI’s visit to Ceuta and Melilla next week could prompt a major diplomatic clash with Morocco, which claims the exclaves as its own and has warned that the visit would be a “provocation.” Any fresh influx of migrants into Ceuta would also increase focus on the unresolved crisis and reshape the electoral narrative around border security and national defense.

The focus of the campaign could also be derailed by the corruption scandals affecting the prime minister’s inner circle. Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez, faces trial for alleged influence peddling and embezzlement. The trial date has not yet been set and is not expected to begin before the election.

Fresh revelations involving close Sánchez ally and former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who is under investigation for alleged influence peddling, criminal organization and document falsification, could prove costly. So, too, could findings linked to the investigation into the Socialist Party’s alleged plot to discredit the judiciary.

Both Gómez and Zapatero maintain their innocence.

The power of the protesters

Sánchez on Monday boasted that, during his time in office, Spain has become “the fastest-growing economy in the entire European Union, leading in job creation.”

But average citizens are not necessarily feeling the impact of Spain’s strong growth and record employment figures. Inflation has outpaced salary gains, leaving many households with little additional purchasing power as prices — and, most crucially, housing costs — surge.

Spain’s housing activists have succeeded in harnessing wider frustration over the cost of living and organizing massive demonstrations and protest encampments in nearly every major city.

The Spanish Tenants’ Union could play a key role in the election by either endorsing a party or undermining turnout by telling supporters to stay home.

The union’s spokesperson, Valeria Racu, told POLITICO her group wanted politicians to commit to enacting indefinite rental contracts, legally mandated rent reductions, an end to evictions and speculative purchases, and a major expansion of public housing by reclaiming homes held by banks and investment funds.

Parties that make those commitments stand to benefit from the protesters’ votes. If none do so, however, there could be a substantial drop in turnout as disillusioned voters stay home. Although polls show housing is a top concern for voters across the ideological spectrum, that scenario would likely be felt most among left-wing parties.

The Trump effect

Three decades ago, then-Agriculture Minister Jesús Posada told conservative Prime Minister José María Aznar that his campaign needed to be based “less on Syria, and more on [the Spanish region of] Soria.”

Elections in Spain are generally decided by local concerns, not foreign affairs. But polls show that Sánchez’s standing has risen when he has clashed with U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the conflicts in Gaza and Iran.

Meanwhile, Trump remains an awkward topic for the People’s Party. Its advocacy of a more traditionally Atlanticist, Washington-friendly foreign policy is hardly a crowd-pleaser in a country where recent POLITICO polling found that a majority of respondents — 51 percent — considered the U.S. to pose a “threat” to Europe.

Vox’s unabashedly pro-MAGA stance has also created tensions with parts of its electorate. The U.S.’s military operations have contributed to soaring fuel and fertilizer costs, hitting the party’s rural voters particularly hard. Trump’s feud with Pope Leo XIV has also raised eyebrows among its conservative Catholic supporters, while the president’s clash with his former ally, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, has irked some far-right supporters.

All politics may be local, but in the world of Trump, developments abroad can have major impact in Spain — and could well play a role in the election.

When I was a kid, I was delighted by the brazenness of generic groceries. There was Dr. Thunder, a soda whose name made its ambitions extremely clear. There were chocolate sandwich cookies called Twist and Shout. Somewhere in the cereal aisle were frosted flakes fronted not by Tony the Tiger but, as I remember it, a polar bear: a perfectly respectable mascot, just not the famous one.

That was part of the charm of generic food. It was forever making a little sideways gesture toward something else. The cookie was an Oreo in community theater; the cereal was performing Kellogg’s in a cheap wig. Whether we bought the understudy depended, in my family, on whether the ingredient “mattered.” For peanut butter cookies, my mom might spring for Jif and Kerrygold, then grab store-brand flour and brown sugar. Lasagna meant Rao’s sauce and Breakstone cottage cheese layered with Kroger ricotta and noodles. Grocery shopping involved a constantly shifting private calculus of where quality lived, where branding mattered and where an extra two dollars seemed frankly ridiculous.

Lately, though, I’ve had the sense that Mariano’s is cosplaying as Trader Joe’s.

It happened gradually enough that I missed the costume change. Then, over a few trips, I started noticing things: bulgogi and birria in the freezer case; grilled mushroom and truffle-oil thin-crust pizza; bronze-cut pasta; baby potatoes with brown butter and herbs; mascarpone vodka sauce. Products that once might have seemed oddly ambitious for a supermarket house brand were simply there, scattered around the store, as though they had always belonged.

The packaging had changed its posture, too: deep, muted colors and big, self-aware type. One jar of Kroger Private Selection preserves lets the raspberry seeds show through the glass beneath a black label announcing RASP-BERRY in enormous pink letters. This is not packaging designed to disappear discreetly beside Smucker’s.

That is increasingly the odd thing about calling any of this “generic.” The word once aptly described products whose chief proposition was resemblance: essentially the same cracker, cereal or can of tomatoes, minus the famous name and a little money at checkout. Now private-label goods account for nearly a quarter of U.S. consumer packaged-goods sales, and 92% of grocery shoppers say they have private-brand products in their homes. 

Nearly half say they bought more of them over the past year, but the more revealing number may be that 94% say they would keep buying them even if grocery prices declined.

Inflation accelerated the shift, but it didn’t invent it. Retailers had already begun turning their house brands into something more particular: not just substitutes, but products with identities, aesthetics and increasingly their own little fandoms. The old question was whether the name brand mattered. Now, in some aisles, the store brand is the name that matters.

Trader Joe’s understood this early. Shopping there has always felt slightly less like provisioning a household than visiting a restaurant whose menu happens to be arranged on shelves. You enter beside buckets of colorful flowers. Products come and go with the seasons. The Fearless Flyer turns new arrivals into minor events. A cashier notices, with the attention of a veteran waiter, the frozen dumplings in your cart and tells you they are her favorite, too.

Even the freezer cases seem to anticipate the question What am I supposed to do with this? The orange chicken is near the frozen rice, which is near the vegetables with stir-fry sauce. Dinner assembles itself spatially. And the products that cannot reasonably be called dinner (Scandinavian swimmers, those ridiculous Inside Out Carrot Cookies, whatever confection has recently been enrobed in dark chocolate) seem to be there largely because someone thought they might be fun.

I rarely leave Trader Joe’s congratulating myself for having economized, although I usually have. Instead, I text my partner some variation of: “I got new stuff for cheap.” Novelty without financial self-reproach is a powerful drug, and it has helped produce a truly astonishing secondary culture of Trader Joe’s blogs, Instagram accounts, rankings and podcasts devoted to the contents of a grocery store.

Other chains have developed their own versions of the phenomenon.

Aldi has what shoppers affectionately call the “aisle of shame,” a rotating stretch of seasonal housewares and oddities that can make a trip for eggs end with an inflatable ottoman in the trunk. It shares Trader Joe’s combination of affordability and discovery, although perhaps with slightly more treasure hunt in its DNA: the Trader Joe’s cult in a German sweater.

The company’s advertising still suggests that not everyone has joined. One recent commercial features a woman attempting to coax her husband out of the car and into Aldi, eventually tempting him with a bag of grass-fed beef sticks. The joke isn’t really that the food is bad. It’s that Aldi is different: unfamiliar labels, quarter-operated carts, its own little set of rules — a place that can inspire evangelical loyalty among regulars and still require explaining to everyone else.

Costco offers a sturdier version of the same intimacy. My parents became Costco people years ago. They enjoy speculating about who really manufactures Kirkland products as though they are solving minor corporate mysteries. My dad owns Kirkland slides. Last Christmas, my mom bought a 500-piece Costco puzzle for us to assemble over the holiday. At a certain point, the private label has escaped the pantry entirely and begun appearing on your feet and your coffee table.

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Whole Foods, meanwhile, is still gently arguing with the ghost of the phrase “Whole Paycheck.” Its 365 line helps make the case that the store can belong to an ordinary grocery routine rather than merely a place to buy $9 yogurt. It works: I have, on multiple occasions, gone there specifically because I wanted the 365 Lemon Tahini Crunch salad.

What these stores have in common is a way of turning the supermarket itself into a brand. More than half of shoppers now say a retailer’s private-brand selection is very or extremely important when deciding where to shop. You don’t merely prefer a certain frozen pizza. You become a person who knows which frozen pizza is worth buying at which store.

Conventional supermarkets have spent years trying to manufacture some version of that attachment. Before the mascarpone vodka sauce came the Starbucks counters, sushi stations, prepared-food bars and, in some Kroger locations, literal bars — all attempts to turn grocery shopping from an errand into somewhere one might willingly linger. Private label gives them another lever. Kroger says its own-brand sales are now growing faster than national brands, with sales of its premium Private Selection line recently up more than 14%.  

Perhaps that is why Private Selection suddenly looks so much less interested in resembling anything else. Generic packaging used to practice a kind of visual ventriloquism, borrowing enough from the famous package to make the reference obvious without kicking off a lawsuit. Today, the raspberry preserves would rather be remembered for themselves. You can tell someone, “Get the jar with the black label,” instead of “Get the jar that looks like, but isn’t, Smucker’s.”

That change also suits the way a growing number of people actually eat. We have become a nation of pantry anthropologists, increasingly comfortable locating pleasure at both ends of the grocery spectrum. American cheese has its place, perhaps melted over instant noodles slicked with black-garlic oil. There are people who can rank sparkling waters with the gravity once reserved for Burgundy. Loving food does not necessarily mean buying the most expensive version of everything. Increasingly, it means knowing where the good stuff is — however you happen to define good.

My mother understood this long before grocery marketers gave it a strategy deck. For years, once it fit comfortably into the budget, she bought Horizon Organic whole milk. At night, she would pour herself a small glass and eat it with a handful of Kettle Brand chips. Those were her things. Elsewhere in the cart, she was perfectly happy to save a dollar.

I have my own version of the list now. I will buy store-brand flour without thinking twice. I will happily eat supermarket frozen dinners, private-label salad kits and whatever peculiar seasonal snack has wandered into Aldi that week. But unless money is especially tight, I get strangely stubborn about butter, jam and coffee. Those still feel like places where I want the thing I want.

Maybe that is what has changed most about the old divide between name brand and generic. The point was never that every expensive thing was better, or that every cheaper thing was a compromise. You have to know what matters to you.

My mother had her milk and kettle chips. I have my butter, jam and coffee. The rest is up for negotiation.

The post How store brands stopped feeling like a second-best choice appeared first on Salon.com.

As I noted a week ago, we can’t know whether the current polls will be predictive of the November election results. But the polls themselves are at least speaking with a clear voice. I want to note two things that appear to be moving in unison: consumer confidence and the Republican position on the national generic ballot.

Here’s the trend line from Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin …