After Wednesday night’s impeccable debate on public television between Pedro Sánchez, Santiago Abascal and Yolanda Díaz, now come the mud-fighting scenes.
For the first time in this campaign, the president and candidate, Pedro Sánchez, pointed in an interview to La Sexta to the “disturbing” – the adjective he put it – affair that has haunted the political career of Alberto Núñez Feijóo: his relations with the drug trafficker from A Illa de Arousa, Marcial Dorado.
You only need to google a little: you type in this name and the photo of the candidate for the presidency of the PP government, much younger than now, appears immediately, next to a man with a beard, also young. Both bare-chested on board a yacht. Who accompanies Feijóo is Marcial Dorado, considered one of the three most important smugglers on the Galician coast. Arrested several times since the 1980s, he was sentenced in 2009 to 14 years in prison.
In the background of the photo in which Dorado and Feijóo appear, you can see the Cíes Islands. A beautiful place with limited visits. Unless one has a yacht. It is the estuary of Vigo in 1995. Few then knew that Dorado was a smuggler. Except for the PP candidate, who even today says he had no idea.
Pedro Sánchez left a warning to Núñez Feijóo on television: “He has the duty to tell the truth to the Spaniards” about this relationship. Truth and lies in this campaign weigh more than any other.
It is not the first time that these photos cross Feijóo’s career. In 2013, when after the publication of the Bárcenas papers everyone thought that Rajoy would fall, the newspaper El País published these images that are now circulating everywhere. It is not far-fetched that some competitor in the PP decided to make them public to prevent Feijóo from launching himself into the race for the succession. Be that as it may, the current leader of the PP, after the publication of these images, disappeared from Madrid and cloistered in Galicia until three years later, in 2016, he obtained a new absolute majority. Then he believed that the sin had been atoned for.
In this campaign, the leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz, Galician like Feijóo, was the first to share the photos at a rally, but for weeks these images, turned into more or less laughable memes, have been circulating the networks.
How will some photos that have been circulating for ten years influence the campaign? Probably not much, but the truth is that this second week of the campaign something has changed – which does not mean that it can significantly alter the expected result. The PP, which has been the builder of the electoral story in this chain of calls – municipal and now general -, has lost the initiative.
Perhaps Feijóo’s absence from Wednesday night’s public television debate was an added blip. This is how some unpublished polls have seen it. There is a relevant fact: the average audience of this debate was 4.1 million; face to face, 5.9 million. Even if it is a lower audience, the number is not negligible. In some communities, such as Madrid, the screen share was close to 50%. There is interest in this campaign and many people are still waiting to decide what they will vote for on Sunday.
Feijóo, suffering from severe back pain, was yesterday in Valencia, where he promised to pass a law to prevent elections from being held in July and August and warned of the price that ERC and Bildu will put for Sánchez to become president of the Spanish Government again. The last days of the campaign are always long and heavy, especially if you have already placed all the messages you had in the argument. Sometimes these last days are too much, especially for what lies ahead.
