Pedro Sánchez (Madrid, 1972) arrives at the spectacular Gallery of the Royal Collections in Madrid with the conviction and security that always denotes. He is convinced that the Spanish will end up giving him the victory and he doesn’t pay attention to the polls. This is his state of mind in the final stretch of the campaign.
How is he when every morning he sees in the polls that they all give him as a loser?
Well, the first thing is that we are in an open election and the PSOE is growing in daily support. We are concentrating votes in a natural way in all voters who are not only progressive, but in those who share one fundamental thing, and that is that Spain does not regress and continues to advance. In this sense, I am convinced that the PSOE will be the first political force, that we will win the elections and that there will be four more years of progressive policies.
Are all polls wrong?
No, no, you have to analyze the surveys, but you can see a dynamic, an orientation; we see a drop in the PP and an increase in the PSOE. We are facing a very open election and I am convinced that we will win it for three fundamental reasons. First, good management: we are leading economic growth and inflation control in Europe, and today we have employment like we have never had in our country. Second, because I think we need to complete many of the advances made in recent years, such as shielding pensions. And third, the only alternative option for my government with Yolanda Díaz is a government of Mr. Feijóo and Mr. Abascal. And we are already seeing this in many councils and communities, it involves a period of involution, of getting into a black tunnel of time.
Don’t you think he didn’t know how to explain all of this in Monday’s debate? Did he miss his big chance there?
It was a rough debate. And indeed, when you face someone who keeps lying, who says that he has approved the revaluation of pensions, when he has not, when he says that the Iberian solution will be repealed and what we have achieved has been its extension , one cannot remain indifferent to the lie and is indignant.
Would you change your strategy, if you had the chance, if you did the debate again?
No, it’s that I think it’s not so much the strategy or not, but how one behaves in the face of lies, in the face of the blatant use of terrorism or in the face of the whitewashing of Vox’s pacts in relation to equality of gender or the protection of the LGTBI group. The PP is muddying politics, generating disaffection, among other things, so that the electorate that goes far beyond the progressive, which allows us to have a much more resounding victory, is not mobilized.
In the debate, Mr. Feijóo handed you a contract for you to commit to supporting the list with the most votes. If we added an addendum to this contract by which Mr. Feijóo undertook to allow him to govern the list with the most votes in Extremadura and the councils that the PSOE won, but which today are governed by the PP and Vox, would you sign the document?
I understand that you ask me this question, but I honestly think that the reality goes another way. The reality is that on May 28, the PP resoundingly decided on government formulations with the ultra-right. He did it before in Castile and Leon. It has done so by being the first force, being the second, even being the third, as in the Canaries. In other words, the ambition of the PP is always to govern and that the PSOE never governs. This already happened to me in 2019, with two electoral repeats in which I effectively had the vote against the PP. And I am also convinced that I will not have the abstention of the PP.
On whether or not to support the most voted list, there is a lot of talk about the risk of blocking. There are those who say that if you lose, you will prevent the PP from governing in order to provoke new elections.
It is that the Spanish have not yet spoken and we are in an electoral process in which we have to explain what balance we have made and also what proposal we make for the next four years. My resounding proposal is to move forward. I mean, we’re not going to do two hundred reforms like we’ve done over the last four years. What we want is to culminate and consolidate these reforms. And the agenda of the PP, and let’s not say Vox, if they were to govern, is a setback, an involution in all these advances. In short, here we are not talking about alternation, as has happened in other electoral processes. Here we are playing with whether Spain continues to advance, as it has done for the last forty years, sometimes to the right, other times to the left, or we enter, I insist, into a tunnel of dark time that we do not know exactly where it will lead us .
In this sense, there are citizens who compare Vox with Podemos, who say that it is the same to agree with the extreme left as with the right.
Well, pay attention, I would answer you with something that happens in Brussels. In the European Parliament, Mrs. Von der Leyen meets with all parliamentary groups, including the party to which Yolanda Díaz belongs, and does not meet with a single parliamentary group, which is the ultra-right Vox. I agree and I don’t have the same political project as Sumar, but we make social progress, gains in rights and freedoms. The PP and Vox agree on an agenda of retrogression, an impudent exchange between rights and votes, between principles and armchairs.
Do you think that the policy you have followed towards Catalonia can make you lose votes?
I did not find a pacified Spain five years ago. First, a Spain with a high disaffection towards politics due to the cases of corruption experienced by the PP. Second, a unilateral declaration of independence, a Supreme Court ruling and obviously a burning Barcelona. And third, a situation of social inequality and lack of creation of opportunities in terms of obvious employment. Well, these three things are what we have rebuilt. In the area of ??Catalonia I have had to make risky decisions to guarantee coexistence. I know that there are people who have not understood the decisions I have taken in Catalonia, who have not shared them, but my duty is not to think about the next elections, but to think about the next generations. And today Catalonia is infinitely better than it was in 2017.
I was asking him because I have the feeling that he seems like he wants to hide it. He does not claim pardons, for example.
No, mind you, I think the opposite. I think that Catalonia was, along with corruption and employment, logically, the three main concerns that came out in all the surveys in 2018. Today, if you have to take one, what are the main concerns of the citizens ? We are talking about employment, healthcare, public services. Catalonia and corruption, fortunately, have moved on to an absolutely different plan.
Although she says it is not on the agenda, Yolanda Díaz told La Vanguardia that she wanted to hold a consultation so that Catalonia could vote on a new political agreement in 2024.
I think this process will require a lot of time, determination, patience and generosity. What Catalan citizens need is to turn a page, live together and also channel those greater desires for self-government that a part of Catalonia may legitimately have, but always towards possibilistic positions. But the positions today are very far apart. Independence is in a referendum on self-determination. And that will not happen because there is no constitution in the world, not even the Spanish one, that allows the segregation of a certain territory. In addition, I have always defended that a consultation in those terms, what would open is a more important division, when all I have done has been to build coexistence. And finally, because I believe that within the Constitution there is enough space for us to move forward and provide a definitive solution to the situation we found ourselves in in 2017.
He says he is convinced to win, but in the hypothesis that the PP does, how do you think the Catalan issue will evolve?
Let’s see, I am convinced that Catalonia will be decisive in the socialist victory on July 23. When I am asked many times, why are you so convinced that you will win? I say, there are many reasons, but one of them is that I am sure that Catalonia will be the vanguard of this Spain that advances for the next four years. Spain needs four more years of progress, and if we talk about Catalonia, multiplied by forty. That is why I insist, I believe that Catalonia will give victory to the PSOE.
Now that we are in Madrid and we are not in Brussels or Vilnius, what do you think of the file that the central electoral board has opened?
It’s strange, because the truth is that, let’s see, I can’t do anything other than obey what the board says, although I have to say that I don’t share it. A politician appears at a press conference or an interview and has to answer questions.
In this campaign, the former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has thrown himself in a very clear way to support him. Did he miss the same support from Felipe González?
I appreciate, and very much, the commitment of José Luis. I have a good relationship with Felipe and he will be involved in the campaign as much as he thinks he should be involved. Felipe, José Luis and I, in my case, had to transform the party, and thanks to this renewal we were later able to transform politics in Spain. And today I am a victim of the same strategy that they suffered when they were in Government. It’s funny to me because Mr. Feijóo tries to distance himself from Abascal, but at the end of the day, they copy his same opposition strategies. And it raises false disjunctives which, moreover, are very dangerous. Because what does it mean? That whoever does not vote for the PP and Vox is not Spain? The truth is that they have a rather peculiar way of uniting Spain.
How has the experience of these last weeks been granting interviews to media to which you had not granted any?
Let’s see, it is clear that there are media powers, also economic powers, to which a clean and autonomous left-wing politician generates discomfort. I know I’ve been inconvenient to the powers that be. And I tried to question the absolute disproportion between a published opinion that tends deeply towards conservative theses, and that does not correspond to what the public thinks on the street. So, roughly speaking, there will be fifty percent of people who are conservative and fifty percent of people who are progressive. So there is a disproportion. Well, every moment has its peculiarities and I understood that it was time to deflate the balloon of Sanchism, based on lies, manipulation and evil.
What do you regret most about your management?
Let’s see, this government has passed two hundred laws. It has faced a pandemic. We have had to deal with rising prices and a war in Ukraine without a continuity solution. Therefore, we have not had a simple legislature. I think that a mistake was clearly the unwanted effects of the law of only yes is yes, but as I told Mr. Feijóo, it is one thing to correct a legal error, and it is another thing to give in to masculinity, as has assumed the PP.
Tell me one good thing you recognize about Mr. Feijóo.
Well… Anyway, I think I’d say it’s, it’s creepy, isn’t it? Suddenly he tells twenty lies and tells them, finally, and doesn’t even flinch. This has some merit
Which Spain do you dream of?
Well, I would say that of full employment, eight percent structural unemployment, reference in ecological transition and digital transformation, and that we be the vanguard in terms of gender equality rights and also rights in favor of diversity . I think we have the best country in the world. We are a country that is admired abroad, modern, pro-European, and I believe that we must continue on this path.
