The Spanish party system has recently undergone profound changes, marked by the rapid rise and decline of several political actors, such as Podemos and Ciudadanos, who challenged the imperfect two-party system that had characterised Spain since transition. The paper analyzes the change in the structure of political opportunities in the Spanish context and the framing strategies of party actors as an explanatory variable of the transformations of the Spanish party system. More specifically, we examine how three main crises - the global financial crisis, the Catalan secessionist challenge, and the COVID-19 pandemic - have impacted the social imaginary and created opportunities for new approaches and electoral competition strategies. Our research reconstructs changes in the Spanish ideological landscape and the relative salience of political cleavages in each of these crises. We argue that they had asymmetric impacts on party politics. Anti-establishment and nationalist populist discourses were effectively used to harness and redirect public discontent against political opponents. Political parties adapted their ideology strategically. Although initially outsider parties took advantage of the drop of trust in public institutions, in the long run, the mainstreaming of populist interpretative frames, paradoxically, ended up consolidating two antagonistic blocs and enabled the resurgence of the two major parties, the PP and PSOE, as undisputed leaders of each of them.