Nobody saw the movement of the President of the Government coming after the results of yesterday’s municipal and regional elections: the dissolution of Las Cortes and the call for elections for Sunday, July 23, just at the beginning of the Spanish presidency of the Council of the Union European Union and in the middle of the holidays of thousands of Spaniards.

The surprise is huge and the date chosen by Pedro Sánchez, who as head of the Executive is the only one who has the power to set it, is not trivial. In fact, the date is the message and it takes on a very special relevance considering the political circumstances that will surround each of the actors who will compete on that day.

The President of the Government has assumed as his own the results of yesterday’s elections which, in his words, will have as their first consequence that “magnificent regional presidents and socialist mayors will be displaced with impeccable management and this despite the fact that many of they have seen their support increase yesterday”.

The institutional power of the PSOE has been greatly reduced and Sánchez needs to unite the party at the risk of being singled out by the fallen regional leaders. Retaining the Moncloa is revealed as the only valid glue to avoid a general rout and doing it urgently allows him to do so avoiding an unbearable internal wear of his personal brand coinciding with the current presidency of the EU -a condition that he will launch on July 1 without knowing if you can keep it in autumn-.

In any case, with the electoral call, Sánchez wants to take advantage of the state of shock caused by the elections to launch three simultaneous messages, to his people, to his coalition partners and to the electorate of the center-left and left. His could be summed up as “either we are in this together or we are left with nothing”; to his partners, “either you join now or you are left out”, and to the center-left electorate, “this is what happens when you don’t go to vote”.

However, there is an uncontrollable variable that can add a large dose of uncertainty to these elections. Participation in a holiday context. There has never been a general election in the middle of summer and turnout could suffer. The most similar case to this are the elections of June 26, 2016 (one month before) that were the repetition of those of December of the previous year. So the PP won 700,000 votes; the PSOE, some 90,000; Unidas Podemos (Podemos and IU together for the first time) lost some 150,000 votes compared to the purple ones.

The leader of the PP has emerged extraordinarily strengthened from the elections this Sunday but when the general elections are held some of its territorial leaders such as Carlos Mazón (Valencian Community), Jorge Azcón (Aragón), Marga Prohens (Balearic Islands) and María Guardiola (Extremadura ) will be negotiating with Vox their respective investitures once their respective parliaments are constituted throughout the month of June. A circumstance that Alberto Núñez Feijóo, once almost the entire Ciudadanos vote has been absorbed, will have to manage intelligently so as not to scare away his more moderate electorate without losing the support of his voters most leaning to the right for the benefit of Santiago Abascal. Here will be the key to obtain, as he wants, “an incontestable majority for a new direction.”

The simple appeal to the useful vote may be insufficient, especially when Pedro Sánchez and the PSOE will not miss the opportunity to accuse their opponent of giving nature to the ultra-right. The “If you don’t go, they’ll come back”, slogan devised by José Zaragoza in the 2008 general elections, makes more sense than ever in these elections.

Santiago Abascal has never hidden his will to govern and condition the political agenda. The Vox leader will want to demonstrate his vocation by trying to place as many of his party’s advisers as possible in the regional governments where they will be key to governing and even more with the prospect of general elections where they intend to enter the executive and condition the policy of Feijóo. In any case, Abascal will arrive at the general elections in excellent conditions to see his objectives fulfilled.

Much of the PSOE’s loss of institutional power in favor of the PP is due to the poor results of the formations located to the left of the Socialists, particularly Podemos, expelled, for example, from Les Corts Valencianes or from the Assembly of Madrid. The presentation of the Sumar project by Vice President Yolanda Díaz in the Magariños pavilion in Madrid without the presence of the leadership of the purples explains, in part, the debacle of the group, despite the fact that during the campaign the main protagonists and, especially Díaz, They have tried to correct the shot.

The two parties, as established by Loreg, will have until June 7, 11 days from today, to communicate the presentation of a possible coalition, something that they have not achieved throughout a year of negotiations. The simple will to survive after July 23 can prevail over any other consideration and favor the unity that both parties proclaim so much but do not close. If this unity is not achieved in time, Sánchez will present himself as the only valid option (useful vote) to stop the right.

Ciudadanos has been swept off the regional map and everything indicates that the same thing could happen to it with respect to Congress, where it maintains only nine deputies. In the midst of this catastrophe, the oranges arrive at the new electoral appointment without their homework done and still have to hold internal primaries to choose a candidate. The current spokesperson in Congress, Inés Arrimadas, has not even run for office yet.

Gabriel Rufián’s leap into municipal politics has resulted in just one more mayor for Esquerra in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, but in general terms yesterday’s elections have been a harsh corrective for Oriol Junqueras’s party and for his support policy to the socialists and their commitment to dialogue, commitments that have not finished forging in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area or in the Catalan capital. Rufián will be the candidate in Congress again but Junqueras has already begun to turn the speech. “Recompose the independence consensus” will be the new mantra of the Republicans until the elections so as not to succumb to the polls again, an appointment that is very uphill for them, jeopardizes all their strategies so far and can end up being a blow more to the Government of Pere Aragonès.

The victory of Xavier Trias in Barcelona and the defeat of Gemma Geis in Girona show the resurgence of the convergent gene in Junts per Catalunya, whose president, Laura Borràs, from the most irredeemable sector, is a few days away from being out of Parliament and with many points to end up entering jail if the Supreme Court confirms his sentence for prevarication and documentary falsification. The pragmatists of Junts have now prevailed and in the primaries that the formation has yet to hold to present a head of the list to Congress, they will want to impose themselves with names such as former ministers Jaume Giró or Josep Rull. However, the former president of the Generalitat Carles Puigdemont is committed to repeating Míriam Nogueras, identified with the toughest sector. It will be necessary to see if the president’s ascendancy is maintained over the organization when precisely three days before the start of the campaign the ruling of the TGUE on his immunity will be known, a circumstance that will undoubtedly have an effect on the mobilization of his electorate.

In the Basque Country, the feeling has settled that the PNV has reached its ceiling and this can already be seen in a low mobilization of its electorate in the municipal elections yesterday, in which it was appreciated how EH Bildu is already on their heels in many cities and towns. The jeltzales, focused in recent years on management and neglecting, according to their critics, identity and social issues, arrive at the elections on 23-J with the wrong foot and it is not surprising that today their spokesperson in Congress and perhaps candidate To repeat, Aitor Esteban, branded Sánchez’s decision as “surprising” and “little justifiable”. The Basque nationalists will be forced to fight against the feared demobilization of their electirate in the middle of a holiday context, a Sunday at the end of July, and the argument of “either us or Bildu” no longer mobilizes as before.

The abertzales are the other side of the coin. Euphoria could be his feeling after some municipal campaigns whose campaign has been done by others. Yesterday they won in Vitoria and Guipúzcoa, they were a thousand votes away from winning San Sebastián and 3,000 away from winning in Pamplona. They will have the key to Navarra and the capital. Their commitment is clear: they want the continuity of Sánchez for four more years to continue developing their social agenda with the showcase in Madrid, precisely an asset that in recent years they have managed to partly wrest from the PNV.