What will remain of these elections beyond the result?
That they are the end of the cycle started in 2014, due to the boredom of corruption and the recession, which questioned the bipartisanship with tides, the process and the emergence of Ciutadans and Podemos.
After ten years, what is left of 2014?
With Ciutadans finished and Podemos diluted in the amalgamation – today 12 parties – common to the Spanish left, the PSOE still asserts its permanence, roots and identity…
Who will emerge better from these ballot boxes: Pedro Sánchez or the PSOE?
Thanks to this robustness, the PSOE, even losing, can now obtain a percentage of votes similar to that of 2019, which was 28.25%.
Why hasn’t Pedro Sánchez worked against everyone?
It is shocking how badly he designed the campaign, because his Government’s policies were more popular than his president and, nevertheless, he does not talk about what he has done, but instead attacks what the PP would do and thus cedes the initiative to him.
Did Sánchez believe his legend?
The municipal elections of 28-M had already shown that it was a mistake to consider them as a personal plebiscite; but Sánchez has not been able to rectify and highlight his work of government and that of his ministers in front of Feijóo.
For example?
When the polls tell him that he is losing votes in favor of the PP: why doesn’t he cede prominence to Minister Margarita Robles, well valued by the right?
Won’t the useful vote for the PP hurt Vox?
Vox was born in 2018, because the new parties did not know how to channel the unrest of the right and now it shows that Spain has the same problems as mature European democracies: the tailwind that benefits the new extreme right…
But will it deflate in the end at the polls?
Polls say that 15% of Vox voters are already returning to the PP; because Feijóo is indeed capable – Casado was not – of stealing votes from Vox; but the relevant thing is that, at the same time, it steals conservative votes from the PSOE.
Is the center a winner again?
This analysis is incomplete without the other big piece: Andalusia. You cannot achieve a synthesis of Spain to expand to the right and left without this engine of sociological change that is Andalusia veering to the right.
Why is southern Spain turning right?
Because there the PSOE was already more conservative than in the rest of Spain and much more than in Catalonia and, in addition, the territorial polarization with the process and Bildu have made it swing to the right and thus throughout Spain.
Andalusia can give the PP the Moncloa?
The incredible electoral strength of the PSOE until today emanated from the Andalusia-Catalonia axis, which made the party the most similar to Spain itself in this intimate, cultural and ideological connection between territories.
You lived in Barcelona and speak Catalan.
I saw Ibarra, Bono and Pasqual Maragall sitting at a table under the same acronym, but this synthesis has today been broken and maybe the PSC will recover, but in Castilla-La Mancha, Galicia and Valencia it is the right – with the key to Andalusia – that imposes its axis.
Doesn’t everything depend on participation?
In other elections, polarization activated participation; but in these the left is unmotivated – in polls, eight points more abstention than the right – and the abstentionist majority is today between the PSOE and Sumar.
And independence abstentionism?
It continues to increase, as was seen in municipalities in the Basque Country and Catalonia.
What do you attribute it to?
The independent is disappointed with the legislature and turns his anger into inhibition.
How much worse – a PP-Vox government – do you think it will be better to revive the process?
This calculation is self-flagellating and short-sighted compared to the constructive pulse of the PNB and Bildu to be the Basque interlocutor that brings things to Madrid. And let the abstentionists be careful, because in the worst cases the Constitution, which seems like a prison to them today, ends up being the last parapet of self-government.
And if Vox reaches the 50 deputies who allow it to appeal unconstitutionality?
They are key and remember that it was a Vox resource, not the PP, that triggered the state of alarm. And attention, because today in Spain there is a third who want more self-government; another that wants autonomy as it is now, and the other aspires to recentralisation.
Isn’t Vox more Spanish than European?
AfD or Le Pen or the Fratelli fight immigration and their enemy is external; for Vox the enemy is within: peripheral nationalisms, progressive ideology… It is the reaction of Spanish nationalism that overflows Rajoy’s conservatism: they are reactionaries.
Why do they want culture and agriculture?
The reactionary vote is built on the idealization of an idyllic past, the countryside and its values, unitary, orderly and fair – also the culture: moral and ethical – which has never existed.
