The electoral advances are loaded by the devil. What is not known is who he shoots in each case. The electoral advance granted Díaz Ayuso’s PP a comfortable majority in 2021. He took it from the socialist Susana Díaz in 2018. The Valencian Ximo Puig combined generals and regional governments in April 2019 and the move came out round, since the left-wing bloc added even more votes in the Valencian elections than in the legislative ones. And now, the popular Moreno Bonilla has advanced the Andalusians with the hope that the outcome will be better than the one produced by the electoral advance decided by his co-religionist Fernández Mañueco in Castilla y León.
The future cannot be guessed, but the past makes it easier for the so-called “counterfactual hypotheses”. What would have happened if Susana Díaz had summoned the Andalusians in the spring of 2019 – when they really played – and she had simultaneously held them with the legislative ones in April of that same year?
Of course, it is not possible to answer this question categorically either, but the results of the 2019 generals in Andalusia offer some clue. In fact, the Andalusian PSOE frequently opted to hold regional and legislative elections together to benefit from the added mobilization that the general elections entailed.
In any case, if the results of both events had been similar to those obtained by the left in the April 2019 general elections in Andalusia, that community would not have changed hands, as it did in December 2018. Now, as the The Andalusian PSOE has been obtaining fewer votes in the regional elections than in the general elections, a more likely scenario would be that of the legislative elections of November 2019, which registered a decrease in the Socialist Party and United We Can, in parallel with a slight rise in the bloc made up of PP, Vox and Cs.
Well, not even in that case – which gave almost a point and a half more in vote share to the center and the right (49%) in Andalusia as a whole – would the left (with 47.7%) have lost the majority in the Andalusian Chamber. By the hair, but PSOE and Podemos would have added 55 seats of the 109 that make up the Chamber of the Hospital of the Five Wounds. In turn, PP, Vox and Ciudadanos would have brought together 54 deputies, although with a very different distribution than that which occurred in 2018.
In the regional elections of December of that year, the correlation between blocks left an advantage of almost six points to the center and the right (more than 50%), compared to the parties of the left (44.1%). And that translated into an advantage of nine seats for the conservative bloc, which was four deputies above the absolute majority. Of course, in 2018 Ciudadanos was on the heels of the PP (21 seats compared to 26), with Vox as the third force (12 deputies). Instead, with the hypothetical result of November 2019, it would have been Vox (23 deputies) who would have stepped on the heels of the Popular Party (24 seats), while Cs would have added only seven seats.
The aforementioned counterfactual hypothesis, built on the results of the November 2019 general elections, hides one last enigma. How would it have been possible that, with fewer votes, the left had added more seats? The explanation lies in the antagonistic provincial results.
For example, in Almería – where the center and the right gathered more than 60% of the votes – and in Granada, Málaga and Cádiz, the Popular Party, Vox and Cs would have added at least one more seat than PSOE and Podemos. But in Córdoba -which distributes an even number of deputies-, both blocks would have tied. And in Jaén and Huelva the advantage would have gone to the left, whose result in Seville (four seats more than the right) would have been key to securing the absolute majority. The problem with history is that it cannot be rewritten.
