If they had voted with local and regional criteria, the result of Sunday’s elections would have been different: the good mayors and the good regional presidents would have won and only the bad ones would have lost. But something else happened: it happened that the “blue wave” flooded everything and the good guys were defeated just like the bad guys. Logical: if a national campaign was carried out, it was voted with national criteria. Consequently, if Pedro Sánchez was personally involved, if he was the protagonist of the campaign and if he even governed from the rally, he was defeated. Those who gave the victory to the PP or doubled the votes of Vox did so against him and against Podemos, his government partner. It means that on Sunday Spain voted against the ruling coalition, that coalition suffered a tremendous vote of punishment and its boss, Pedro Sánchez, reacted with unexpected audacity.
The president perhaps wondered how this defeat was possible, if his economic management accumulated successes, if Catalonia was much better than in 2017, if the word stability dominated the atmosphere, if Joe Biden proclaimed his international leadership and if valued analysts noted the fall of the so-called Feijóo effect. What the polls said was something that did not enter his head: that a large part of Spanish society did not believe these wonders; that the good macroeconomic data was denied by inequality, by the difficulty of access to housing or by the deterioration of the middle classes; that the good territorial policy was not accompanied by an effective discourse on the idea of ​​Spain; that the action of Unidas Podemos gave an image of two governments; that the most progressive laws seemed contrary to traditional morality without a leadership that assumed its pedagogy, and that the progressive revolution of the Government, “the most progressive in history”, caused more discomfort than satisfaction.
It often happens that, once the social anger has been expressed in an election, the electorate rectifies it. That is one of the hopes of the Socialist Party and it is probably one of the arguments that pushed Pedro Sánchez to advance the general elections. There you have the ingenious author of the resistance manual. With his bold initiative, he aspires to achieve various goals. One, to reduce the impact of Sunday’s defeat: public and published opinion have less than 24 hours to recreate it and turn to the July polls. Two, show a democratic spirit by their willingness to assume failure and demand that the national will be expressed. And three and more strategic, call to vote in full negotiation of the new conservative majorities to evict the PSOE and hold the elections under the impact of those pacts, which will be presented as the arrival of Vox to power. In this way, Sánchez hopes that the July polls will be the elections of fear: “Either me or the extreme right.” And he hopes, above all, that they will be the plebiscite that on May 28 could not be.