“The style is the man himself.” This famous phrase, pronounced by Georges-Louis Leclerc, illustrious Count of Buffon, after being chosen as one of the forty immortals of the French Academy, explains better than any survey the insistence of the Socialists, whom almost all the polls insist on evict from Moncloa, in attacking the political image of Alberto Núñez Feijóo on account of his “inaccuracies” about the revaluation of pensions.
The electoral campaign of 23J, which began with the left calling for an anti-fascist crusade through the method of infinitely amplifying the influence of Vox in a hypothetical future executive cohabiting with the PP, ends with a bitter disquisition, more interested than metaphysical, about the meaning and transcendence of truth and lies.
The transition between these two arguments –ideas are something else– is striking. From the exaggeration, the PSOE and Sumar have been transitioning, almost as if they were the same, towards an ad hominem targeting. Because? Obviously, it is not a mental relief, but a war tactic. A kind of combo action. And a last minute attack.
The (constant) appeals to the extreme right, which are not supported by the reflection available in the polls, but which have been fueled thanks to the usual stage provocations by the Vox leaders after their entry into various regional governments, do not wear out the PP excessively.
Its objective is another: to mobilize the electorate that defines itself as progressive so that it suspends its critical sense, just as happens in the fictional pact that governs novels, and goes to the polls this Sunday. The formula does not seem to finish giving results.
The explanation lies in what happened a little over a year ago – on 19J – in Andalusia, where Moreno Bonilla obtained an absolute majority thanks to what in the Genoa noble plant they call the Andalusia effect. A success based on two environmental factors.
The first obeys, to describe it in some way, the context: the sudden call to the polls coincides with a marked political weakening of the PSOE. In the great autonomy of the South, the socialists inhabited 19 J in irrelevance, which began when in 2018 they were expelled from San Telmo. Moreno Bonilla’s electoral advance minimized his possible margin of electoral recovery and exacerbated his internal crisis, which came to an end on 28M.
In the general elections, this situation has not yet occurred, but it is enunciated as the starting hypothesis of the campaign. The PP leads almost all the polls and Ferraz appears as the loser. The initial framework of interpretation is hostile. The second circumstance that granted the president of the Board, in whom Genoa sees a kind of advance of the candidate Feijóo, absolute parliamentary and institutional power was the theory of the dam.
It should be formulated like this: if the idea that the extreme right can really reach the government is installed among the progressive (or liberal) electorate, the lesser evil (read the useful vote) is to support the PP, instead of the PSOE. The second conclusion is inferred from the first: voting for a candidate whom all the polls, except the CIS, rank as a loser makes any vote in his favor sterile, since he apparently lacks the capacity to reverse the situation.
Moreno Bonilla triumphed a year ago in the South thanks to this equation: if you are progressive and want to stop the ultramontanes, you must opt ??for the conservatives; not for the left. This conclusion is fed, paradoxically, by the (environmental) framework created by the left. It gives the feeling that this is what is happening in these last days of the campaign, although with somewhat less intensity than in Andalusia. And this is the great problem of Genoa.
The president of the Junta, threatened by a Macarena Olona who then demanded to enter the Quirinale at all costs, received a transfer of votes from the PSOE of the order of 15% in the regional elections. Vox did not lose voters: it won two seats. His failure was not demoscopic, but combinatory: the PP stopped needing his help thanks to getting many socialist votes.
At the beginning of this week, Genoa estimated between 8 and 10% the supposed increase in votes provided that Feijóo would receive from the social sphere of moderate socialism. Insufficient to obtain hegemony, yes, but useful to articulate a majority (or an agreement with the PNV and CC). Hence the urgency of the PSOE in these last days of war is to pierce the personal image of Feijóo, who came out better off than Sánchez in his only face-to-face duel.
They could not put Moreno Bonilla in trouble either with pensions – they are not a regional competence – or by presenting him as a Vox puppet because his first legislature was an exercise in gattopardism – to dilute the rejection of many PSOE voters – together with an effective stage distancing (not parliamentary) from the ultramontanes.
Feijóo, a PP candidate for a year, is not running for re-election. He is the applicant. Sowing doubts about his credibility may not make Sánchez win the elections, but it leaves open the hope of the PSOE that the battle can be drawn. That the enemy does not conquer a hill is not the same as winning the war. But stopping his advance is a start.
