After linking two electoral campaigns, the main parties, the PSOE and the PP, reach the end of the marathon practically exhausted. The popular ones come out as favorites in the contest, but this last week they have shown signs of fatigue. The PSOE is trying to overturn the polls by appealing to the comeback and to mobilize an electorate that turned its back on it in the past municipal and regional elections.
The PP has taken the initiative and has been the singing voice for almost the entire campaign, but this last week it has accumulated some very big mistakes and, although it remains to be seen whether these stumbles will take their toll at the polls, they have sown confusion in the electorate.
The decision of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, winner of the only televised face-to-face, to remove himself from the debate on RTVE, which had a remarkable audience, gave free rein to the PSOE, Sumar and Vox to gloat over the absent leader of the PP. The president of the ultra party, Santiago Abascal, had ground to spread his electoral program under the criticism of the tandem formed by Pedro Sánchez and Yolanda Díaz.
The various versions he has offered these days about his relationship with the drug trafficker Marcial Dorado have also not benefited Feijóo in this final stretch. The leader of the PP has tried to avoid criticism for his friendship, in the nineties, with the drug trafficker. First he assured that when he met him he didn’t know what he was doing, because “before there was neither Google nor the internet”. Yesterday he acknowledged in an interview with Cope that when they were photographed together on a yacht, Dorado “was a smuggler. Smuggler, never drug trafficker”.
This confusing strategy is not only attributable to the management of Genoa. Yesterday in Vitoria the PP agreed with Bildu – the leading force in the city – to distribute the presidency of the municipal committees of the City Council and left out the PSE and the PNB. The reaction was not long in coming. Those with the slogan “que et voti Txapote” allies of the “filoetarra” party. Bad business a day before the elections, especially because the popular leader, in the interview published this week in La Vanguardia, did not want to censor this controversial sentence with which they attack Pedro Sánchez.
The agreement between the PP and Bildu was valid for a few hours and when they saw the controversy generated, the popular decided to take a step back just yesterday.
The Foundation for Social Analysis and Studies (FAES), chaired by the former president of the Spanish government José María Aznar and linked to the PP, has also contributed to this strange end to the campaign. He published an editorial in which Yolanda Díaz is described as a “neocommunist figurine made very hastily with Dior cut-outs and mediocre self-help literature”. Some comments that were rejected as “sexist” by the Sumar group.
They don’t give the PSOE anything for granted. They assure Ferraz that Feijóo will not be able to join Vox and propose different scenarios, in which they do not rule out that Pedro Sánchez could re-edit the government again.
Aware that the socialists have been penalized more by the pacts with EH Bildu and ERC than the popular ones by the agreements in councils and autonomy with Vox, Sánchez yesterday accused Feijóo of using the “fear” of holding a possible referendum in Catalonia and the Basque Country to alarm his voters. A claim of the Republicans and the Abertzales in this electoral campaign. “It is not included in the Spanish Constitution, nor in any Constitution in the world”, he assured.
During the last day of the campaign, the socialist leader also claimed a large majority to govern with the formation of Yolanda Díaz and thus not have to negotiate laws with “15 parties” as in this legislature.
The future of Sánchez and Díaz is linked, like that of Feijóo and Abascal. The struggle to be the third force between Sumar and Vox may end up deciding the post-electoral pacts, if there is no clear winner in the end, but the useful vote threatens the electoral results of these two formations.
The same goes for the pro-independence and regionalist parties, who have had a difficult time getting their heads together during this campaign that has recovered the old bipartisan tendencies. In Catalonia, the fight for second and third place is contested by ERC and Junts, who want to maintain influence in Madrid, although it remains to be seen what results the popular Catalans can obtain, as some polls place them in front of the two pro-independence forces.
Tomorrow we will know the outcome and who will have control over the governance of Spain, if there is no deadlock.
