Current polling puts the Partido Popular at 31.9 percent and the PSOE at 27.1, a gap of nearly five points with a general election expected in 2027. Government parties collectively hold around 44.3 percent of seats in the seat projections, which is the number that decides whether a lead translates into power.
The gap is not the whole picture, and in the Spanish system it rarely is. A four or five point national lead has repeatedly failed to produce a governing majority, because what matters is which blocs can assemble a Congress. Sanchez has built two governments from a weaker position than the one the PP holds now.
The pressure is the corruption caseload rather than the polling. Sanchez's party is working through several court cases involving graft allegations, including the conviction of a former transport minister. Individual cases are survivable. A sequence of them establishes a frame that opposition messaging can run on without having to make an argument.
Ceuta has arrived in the middle of this, and it changes the terrain rather than the numbers. A migration crisis moves the campaign onto ground where the PP and Vox are more comfortable and the governing coalition is internally divided, with coalition partners publicly at odds over how to read foreign reaction to the crossings.
A year is a long time and Spanish polling has been wrong about the shape of a result more than once. What the current position establishes is that the government now needs events to break its way, and it has just had a week in which they did not.