Despite being in an electoral campaign, or precisely because of it, the PSOE has decided to redouble the educational work on the achievements and merits achieved by the coalition government led by Pedro Sánchez since he won the motion of censure against former President Mariano Rajoy. Achievements that despite the covid pandemic and the consequences of the war in Ukraine have allowed Spain to reach the “historic figure of 20 million employed, affiliated and lowered the barrier of 3 million unemployed”, according to highlighted the deputy general secretary of the party, Adriana Lastra.
At a press conference after the meeting of the party’s Executive, Lastra reviewed these achievements in contrast to “the tension, insolvency and lies” that, in his opinion, the president of the PP, Alberto Núñez, boasts Feijóo, whom he has compared to his predecessor, Pablo Casado.
The PSOE will resume the “federal campaigns” that it planned to undertake at the beginning of the year but that were shelved by the irruption of the electoral advance in Castilla-La Mancha. Now, despite the fact that there is another appointment with the polls also in advance, in Andalusia, the party believes that this pedagogical work cannot be extended with the objective: to mobilize the left-wing electorate.
“We have been forgetting how the country was four years ago”, when Rajoy governed, “and how it is now”, Lastra has justified, who has recalled, among other decisions, that the Socialists “removed the pharmaceutical co-payment that the PP required to pay our elders” upon coming to power, and from then on, the Interprofessional Minimum Wage has been raised to a historical maximum and youth unemployment, women’s unemployment and the temporary labor rate have been reduced to a historical minimum”.
The objective is the mobilization of the left-wing electorate, which threatens to be one of the reasons for the reduced expectations of the PSOE-A and its candidate, Juan Espadas, ahead of the elections on June 19. This work will be carried out thanks to a “very mobilized militancy against the PP’s strategy of tension, noise and trying to overshadow all the action and achievements of the Government,” Lastra alleged.
The socialist leader has attacked the PP and Feijóo for their statements trying to underestimate these socioeconomic achievements. They especially sting the references of the leader of the popular ones on the unemployment data and for that reason the PSOE puts the accent on the achievements in this folder. “If the PP had been governing, it would have suffered a pandemic and a war in Ukraine, but there would be no ERTE aid, no social shield, no recovery plan, no rise in the SMI, no expansion of workers’ rights, no increase in pensions”, guaranteed the socialist deputy secretary.
Only with this balance, the PSOE explains that Feijóo considers that “it is bad news for him” any “good news for Spain”. And in fact, he has put him on a par with his predecessor at the head of the party, Pablo Casado, because “the PP began by questioning the legitimacy of the government and Feijoo continues to do so”, and like Casado, Feijóo “went to Europe to question Spain before his partners”, referring to his speech before the congress of the European People’s Party (EPP). After accusing him of “disloyalty” and of generating “tension, insolvency and lies”, Lastra lamented that the popular “changed their cat but the bell continues to sound the same”.
The PSOE campaign, based on the recent fourth anniversary of the motion of censure that ousted Rajoy de la Moncloa, has a clear electoral bias. In fact, the PSOE is convinced that, despite the polls, “there is a party” and Swords will achieve “a very good result” on 19-J. “I trust the candidacy and the Andalusian electorate,” said the deputy secretary, who has refuted a possible contagion effect after the latest electoral defeats in Madrid and Castilla-La Mancha: “Each autonomous community has its reality, its idiosyncrasies.”
