The elections in Andalusia are going to have a single result -the one dictated by the polls-, but they will throw up a wealth of polysemic and divergent meanings. The most obvious reading has a state framework: is the rightward shift of the great autonomy of the South a prelude to what is going to happen next year in Spain?
Other interpretations announce an episode of historical radiation. This is the great finale of southern socialism, which, by extension, makes many leaders of the Old Testament fear – that is what the old socialists who have not lost their ironic capacity call themselves – that 19-J could be the beginning of the pasokization of the PSOE.
The Board is the work of the patriarchs of Andalusian socialism, a political generation (González, Guerra, Escuredo, Borbolla, Chaves and Griñán, among other names) whose heritage contrasts with the legacy, in a certain premature sense, that their political successors treasure (Susana Diaz or Pedro Sanchez).
The loss of San Telmo in 2018, the great symbol of power, was a tragedy that, however, had something circumstantial. An inevitable event after 36 years in power. An episode, in short, that could be remedied soon through robust opposition work. Andalusian sociology -it was said- is on the left. It’s not so clear anymore.
The great loss of Alhama – the expulsion of San Telmo was experienced within the Andalusian PSOE with the same loss as that sung by the anonymous romance – occurs due to the sum of the internal wear and tear and the irruption of Vox in the space of the right. Three and a half years later, it has ended up consolidating itself and, according to the surveys, it is an irremediable fact. The CIS, in its latest poll, puts the political advance of PP and Vox at 20 points compared to 2018. In parallel, it predicts that Juan Espadas (Sánchez’s candidate) will not be able to keep the electoral ground obtained then.
For the socialists, Andalusia has gone from being a bastion to becoming a desert without an oasis one year before the municipal elections, where the city councils and the councils will be renewed, their last line of institutional defense. The heirs have not been able to preserve the Andalusian mayorazgo, which implies a totally new scenario: the decline of the brand can be lasting. Durable over time. The crossroads transcends the immediate if one takes into account that the socialists cannot claim -without problems- their political past either.
González and Guerra, the great pioneers, have long lived in a golden reserve. His figure is light years away from the new generations. Worse is the reflection of the previous socialist presidents of the Board. The ERE scandal, which condemned the entire leadership of the Chaves and Griñán governments -and the latter to a prison sentence that the Supreme Court will evaluate after 19-J-, opened a hiatus in the official history of the southern PSOE. It is a memory that, more than nostalgia, causes discomfort: vindicating its figures does not help the brand at all.
In fact, it harms the electoral options of the PSOE. Susana Díaz established in 2013, as soon as she entered San Telmo, a firewall in relation to her predecessors, despite the fact that her appointment as president, before having to undergo any electoral process, was decided unilaterally by Griñán . Espadas, the socialist candidate of 19-J, has extended this preventive distance to include Díaz, widening the black hole of the Andalusian PSOE – a political vacuum where the sunlight does not enter – almost to its original seed.
It is necessary to go back to the period 1982-1990, in the period of government of the first two autonomous presidents, Rafael Escuredo and José Rodríguez de la Borbolla, to reconnect with an unblemished lineage. Too far behind for an electorate that, to a large extent, no longer feels identified with the story of a self-government that has completed four decades.
The PSOE has lost its (political and symbolic) monopoly in Andalusia due to the asymmetric sum of time, the erosion of government, cases of corruption and the skilful movements of the PP (first with Arenas, then with Moreno Bonilla) in defense of an Andalusian calm that, thanks to gestures of concord -the PP candidate for San Telmo awarded Escuredo the Clavero Arévalo medal two years ago, thus linking the first socialist president with the former minister of the UCD–, has managed to leave without the exclusive patent of the heritage autonomy to a PSOE that can neither make its past profitable nor knows how to get rid of it.
