If there is nothing more dangerous than an injured wild animal, this is how Pedro Sánchez showed himself yesterday before his adversaries. Against everything and against everyone, again. And with all the wind against. But also with true fury, as his faithful described him, from kilometer zero of his political project, in the Seville town of Dos Hermanas, to undertake the final electoral contest against the conservative tsunami that on May 28 already took away most of of land power.
Sánchez is not politically dead, no matter how much Alberto Núñez Feijóo, with the help of Santiago Abascal, wants to give him the last straw in the general elections on July 23. This is the great message that the PSOE leader wanted to convey yesterday at his first pre-campaign rally, in Dos Hermanas, just where he began his political resurrection in 2017 that ended up transporting him to Moncloa barely a year later.
“When we socialists are given up for dead, we have become stronger and more alive,” warned the mayor of this Sevillian town and one of Sánchez’s faithful from the first hour, Paco Rodríguez, recently reissued the overwhelming absolute majority than his predecessor, Quico Toscano, revalidated up to ten consecutive legislatures. “I have more strength than ever, more desire than ever to win the elections!” Sánchez exclaimed before some 4,000 supporters, according to the organization, totally excited.
The mayor recalled that it was precisely in Dos Hermanas that Sánchez, in January 2017, announced his candidacy for the primaries, “to fight against everything and everyone”, where he regained the leadership of the PSOE. And he offered all the rally attendees as his “warriors” for the final battle.
“Here in Dos Hermanas, where that wonderful adventure that has made us change Spain for the better began, I am not willing for this trip to end on July 23, Spain and the social majority of this country do not deserve it,” said Sánchez . “We have not made this trip to stay here, we are going to continue fighting and guaranteeing that Spain advances for four more years. I am not willing for the road to end here, the journey must continue!” he insisted.
Sánchez tried to inject combat morale into the Socialists, as Minister María Jesús Montero, deputy general secretary of the PSOE and head of the Congress list for Seville, did with another energetic intervention to raise the spirits of his troops. With the mobilizing argument among its ranks that it is the threat of a Feijóo and Abascal government in Spain, after the agreements signed between the PP and the extreme right of Vox to wrest autonomous communities and town halls from the PSOE. He thus called for the total mobilization of the progressive electorate and to concentrate the vote in the PSOE to avoid the dispersion of the vote of the left.
This, he assured, is the great lesson to be drawn from the enormous loss of institutional power of the PSOE after the municipal and regional elections of 28-M. “Make no mistake. If progressive Spain mobilizes and is going to vote on July 23, and if it concentrates all its votes in the PSOE, we will guarantee that Spain continues to grow for four more years”, encouraged Sánchez. “And we will avoid the role of suffering a government of Feijóo and Abascal.”
Although the responsibility of being able to reissue a progressive government in Spain is “non-transferable” from the PSOE, he warned, without alluding to the Sumar candidacy led by Yolanda Díaz. “This is the question: either the socialist ballot or the role of having a PP government with Vox, with Feijóo and Abascal at the head,” she stressed.
The president warned of the rise of the extreme right in Europe and encouraged the PSOE to have “the honor of being the first progressive political force capable of stopping the right and extreme right in Europe on July 23.” “Let’s show the world and Europe that they are not stopping us and that we are going to stop the right and the ultra-right!” she cried.
Sánchez insisted on pressuring the PP leader to attend electoral debates. “I have been summoning Feijóo to debate with me for two weeks and everything has been excuses and long changes,” he lamented. And he assured that Feijóo “does not want to debate because he does not know how to explain his pacts with the extreme right.” He also reproached that one month after 23-J “we still do not know what his economic project is” or who his ministers would be, if he arrives at Moncloa, “except for the vice-presidential candidate who is Santiago Abascal.”
But Feijóo is wrong, settled the PSOE leader, “because democracy is debates, not monologues; contrast of data and arguments, not hoaxes and misinformation; Democracy are proposals, and not insults”. “Anyone who does not want to debate does not deserve the trust of the citizens on July 23, because he hides something and does not want to show his face,” Sánchez challenged.
