PSOE Andalusia swaps Jaén list leaders for gender parity before 29 November vote

Jaén list swap

The regional executive of the Andalusian Socialists (PSOE-A), chaired by María Jesús Montero, met in Seville on Thursday, 15 October, to approve the candidate lists for the general election on 29 November. The meeting came the day after the provincial executives approved their list proposals for Congress and the Senate. Nearly all proposals were passed on unchanged. The exception is Jaén, where Isabel Uceda moves up from second to first place on the Congress list, and Juan Francisco Serrano, who headed the Jaén list in the 2023 election, drops to second. The Jaén provincial committee had put Serrano at the top on Wednesday, 14 October. Serrano was deputy to Santos Cerdán when Cerdán was the party's organisation secretary, and Cerdán is himself under investigation for corruption by the National Court. Party leadership sources rejected the idea that the change reflected Serrano's closeness to Cerdán, framing it instead as a technical adjustment for parity.

Parity and the ministers

Montero told reporters before the meeting that the swap was meant to promote parity, which she called a shared obligation and a vocation of the party. She argued that the number ones for Congress and the Senate meet parity overall.

The 'number ones' for Congress and the Senate meet this parity overall.

Of the 16 number ones on the Socialist ballots in Andalusia, ten are men and six are women, a 62.5% to 37.5% split against a 60% to 40% threshold. Montero said that in some provinces parity was not possible because a minister heads the list. When the government proposes a minister for a provincial list, she argued, the minister's own status determines the gender of that candidacy, so the province should not be charged with it. The only minister on the Andalusian lists is Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares, who runs in Cádiz, after Agriculture Minister Luis Planas stepped aside from leading the Córdoba list.

Men

10

Women

6

Men

10 candidates

Women

6 candidates

The rest of the slate

In Seville, Alfonso Rodríguez Gómez de Celis, vice-president of the Congress, leads the list in place of Montero. The other heads of list are Gabriel Cruz in Huelva, Albares in Cádiz, Alberto Mayoral in Córdoba, José Bernal in Málaga, María José Sánchez in Granada and Anabel Mateos in Almería. Provincial party secretaries were told they should not head Congress lists, though they could lead Senate lists if they chose. The Jaén Congress list also includes Education Secretary of State Abelardo de la Rosa and the Cazorla councillor Ainoa Caravaca.

What comes next

The lists now go to the Federal List Commission, which is expected to approve them on Friday, 16 October. The Federal Committee of the PSOE is due to ratify them definitively on Saturday, 17 October. These are the last internal steps before the 29 November vote, and the timeline below traces them from the provincial committees onward.

1. Oct 14, 2026Provincial committees approve list proposals; Jaén committee names Serrano as top candidate
2. Oct 15, 2026PSOE-A regional executive approves the lists and moves Uceda to Jaén's top spot
3. Oct 16, 2026Federal List Commission expected to approve the lists
4. Oct 17, 2026PSOE Federal Committee set to ratify the lists