Initial wish: that the face-to-face is less strenuous than the previous overdose of semiotics. Infected by this epidemic, the minister Félix Bolaños said that the PP represents “Cash Spain”. Bolaños may not have realized that there is nothing more caspós than the adjective caspós. Vicente Vallés and Ana Pastor dispatch the rules of the game (stopwatch, blocks) as the airplane crews explain the safety ritual. What is at stake is transcendent, but perhaps there is no need to add more tension. A tension that has more to do with a media overinterpretation of politics than with the reality of the debate. A debate that begins with an accelerated Pedro Sánchez, condescending, tense and with touches of overly artificial humor. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, on the other hand, settles into a catenaccio of contemptuous sobriety (when Sánchez speaks, he doesn’t even look at him). This places the debate in a fencing of mutual accusations that tends to the stridency and the discredit – it does not come from a pam – of the dialogue. Candidates exchange data with a lack of scholastic rigor. The split screen dramatically summarizes the logic of a two-party system – PP and PSOE – responsible for almost all the problems Spain is facing.
The acceleration of Sánchez, who gestures and interrupts, weakens him, and forces Vallés to lead him back and update that Olympic “athletes, get off the stage”. Every time Feijóo tells him “Don’t get nervous”, Sánchez turns to the grimace and the swagger, which do not respect the attention of the viewer, and claims that he is not nervous but indignant. The Sánchez of yesterday must be aware that he is losing his papers. This is the only way to understand that, outraged or not, he persists in interruption and compulsive reproach, that he attacks by aspersion and that he does not realize that affirming that the PP and Vox are the same is a desperate resort.
The feeling is that Feijóo does not need to convince anyone. It is enough to alter his rival to, without making feasible proposals, question five years of government. When Sánchez claims the work done, Feijóo also interrupts him, but in a more sibylline way (he tries not to talk at any time about the effects of the war in Ukraine and the brutal consequences of the pandemic).
After the publicity, Sánchez does not recover the institutional dignity and does not control either the tempo of the discussion or the emotional administration of the convictions. When he recovers the argumentative balance – about the PP pacts, taking inventory of the threats embodied by the right-wing parties or talking about Catalonia – it is too late. If it is true that this face-to-face will be decisive, you only have to imagine the wave that will cause the hangover from yesterday’s show. A wave that will favor the PP more than Vox and that will perpetuate disruption, exasperation and confusion as the instruments that will define the media and political landscape of the coming days.
Oh, and it’s confirmed: the final minute of asking for the vote while looking at the camera is torture for the candidate, who is subjected to inhuman levels of alien shaming. It is also for the viewers, who if they had started to decide the vote, can think again about the abstention after feeling legitimately disappointed by yesterday’s face-to-face (by the way: well managed by Atresmedia). Desperate thought: even if the candidates disappoint, the alternative to parliamentary democracy is always worse.
