Mission accomplished. The herculean task that Pedro Sánchez and his collaborators devised on the fateful night of last May 28 has been successfully completed. That day the PSOE lost the communities of Aragón, the Balearic Islands, Extremadura, the Valencian Community and La Rioja. Almost nothing. The PP made an electoral turnaround and took more than 600,000 votes from the socialists. There was still more than half a year left until the date of the general elections and it seemed that the socialists were going to experience an ordeal.
That night, Sánchez asked his collaborators to extrapolate the still warm results that had occurred in the municipal and regional elections to the eventual general ones. After hours of study, it was concluded that there were chances of winning. The next day, Sánchez appeared before the Spaniards and announced, to general astonishment, that he was advancing the elections to July 23. If you’ll excuse the quote, that same day I wrote in this section: “Feijóo would do well not to be overconfident. Sánchez has shown signs of his resilience in the most complex circumstances and taking the game for granted could be a serious mistake.”
The final result is already known to everyone. On 23-J Alberto Núñez Feijóo clearly won the elections, but the PP’s inability to forge complicities with the nationalist parties led him to be left alone with Vox and without the possibility of access to the majority. Sánchez took advantage of the months of paralysis, partly a product of Feijóo’s failed investiture, to overcome distrust with Junts, which was the formation that had until now proven the most elusive to join the “progressive” majority.
Finally, Sánchez has done it again. The price he has paid is very high in terms of discomfort and discontent among many citizens who do not approve of his pact with the Catalan independentists. The new challenge that he must face from today to remain in power is not only to overcome the disagreements that will exist between the amalgamation of parties that support him. Just as important is to accentuate the climate of coexistence that has been generated in Catalonia and reassure all those who fear that the process will be revitalized.
