“It is my duty”. This is how Pedro Sánchez justified, at the meeting with which he launched the electoral campaign yesterday at the Casa de Campo in Madrid, his decision to put all the focus on the alert against a possible alliance of the PP and Vox to evict him from the Moncloa after 23-J.
The president of the central government thus unleashes those who, from inside and outside the PSOE, warned him that pivoting his campaign on the fear of the right and the ultra-right would not be effective. In fact, it did not work for him in previous electoral contests. But as he already did before the PSOE federal committee, Sánchez concluded that it is his duty to alert the public, every day, against a coalition of the right. And so it will.
It is his duty, therefore, “to warn about the involution and retrogression represented by the agreements that Feijóo has signed with Abascal”. “I will do it from the first day to the last of the electoral campaign, because it is a duty”, he warned.
This time, socialist strategists argue, is different. Because the citizens are already realizing after the elections of May 28, in their own cities and communities, the scope of the PP and Vox pacts. And in Moncloa and Ferraz they assure that they are already recovering positions in the face of this “conservative tsunami”. “Fear is spreading in the headquarters of the PP-Vox coalition in the face of a comeback by the PSOE, which is already a fact and is gaining more support every day”, they say.
“I will win the elections”, assured Sánchez yesterday, as a spoiler. “And they will lose those whose only proposal is to take our country backwards”, he said, insistently referring to the PP and Vox. “In twenty days we have gone back twenty years in the public debate. Feijóo and Abascal are the tunnel of time. Ten years of retrogression in the rights of workers and pensioners, twenty years in LGBTI rights, forty years in women’s rights and eighty years in cultural censorship”, he warned.
Sánchez asked for the trust of a large social majority to stop this blue wave. Even of those who never voted for the PSOE, but who now “don’t like the dark movie trailer of these pacts between Feijóo and Abascal in autonomous communities and town councils”. “This is serious, and citizens need to be alerted”, he reiterated.
The alternative of 23-J is not “Sánchez or Spain”, as Feijóo says. The disjunctive, he stressed, is: “Or Sánchez, or Feijóo and Abascal”. With a conviction: “Spain is much better than the PP and Vox, and that’s why we will win”.
Sánchez thus starts a new electoral campaign, which is almost the natural environment of his accelerated political trajectory, this time with all the headwinds after the 28-M, in which the PP won the PSOE by more than 760,000 votes to the municipalities and took away almost all of their territorial power.
This fateful election night, which meant a severe unexpected institutional setback for the socialist strategists, with the loss of the Valencian Community government or the Seville City Council as great symbols of the hecatomb, seems to have left Sánchez sentenced, since it definitively promoted the change in the political cycle that encourages Feijóo throughout Spain. But precisely for this reason Sánchez rushed the next day to the general elections for 23-J, as the last chance to get re-election before the conservative wave finished sweeping him away.
Throughout his eventful career, Sánchez always showed courage in the face of adversity. To the PSOE and then to the Central Government. And to this letter he again bet with this electoral advance to achieve a “resurrection” like the one he starred in when he regained the leadership of the party in 2017, after having been defenestered by the entire socialist establishment the previous year, or with an invitation similar to that of the motion of censure he won in 2018, to evict Mariano Rajoy, or the repeat election in 2019, which finally forged his government coalition with Unides Podemos.
The leader of the PSOE is now trying to rebuild the “epic” that helped boost his political profile – “against everything and against all” -, rebutting in front of prime time audiences the “insidies” about the character portrayed by right, while the blue wave threatens to swallow him for good.
Despite the fact that he seems to have everything against him, and most polls confirm this, Sánchez assures that he has two cards in his favor. On the one hand, that Yolanda Díaz’s Sumar project – indispensable to re-edit a progressive coalition government – ??managed to ally almost the entire left of the PSOE, including Podemos, and avoided a dispersion of the vote with devastating effects on the 28 – M. And, on the other hand, that the pacts with the ultra-right could have a heavy toll on the PP. Or at least wake up the progressive voter.
