The parties of the extinct Pacte del Botànic – PSPV, Compromís and Unides Podem – have not been able, more than two weeks after 28-M, to carry out a critical reading of what happened in the last regional and local elections in the Valencian Community, of the change in the political cycle that has ended the project of the Valencian left that began in 2015. Both collectively and individually, they have only offered, as a balm, readings already agreed on the effects of a campaign with a marked plebiscite character and the difficulty, real, to introduce into the electoral ecosystem elements of regional and local management. A discursive framework, as Lakoff would say, that the PP has been able to locate with proven skill, with undeniable media support, and in which the PSOE (Pedro Sánchez) has participated without assessing the consequences. But together with the aforementioned factors, common to what happened in the rest of Spain, the Valencian left have suspiciously avoided the necessary value judgment of some results that, moreover, have dynamited the weak complicity that remained between the forces of the Botànic and In addition, they have opened internal fractures in these parties, with consequences still to be defined. The call for general elections on 23J has aggravated, if possible, everything that has been mentioned up to now.
The defeat has made resentment and suspicions emerge with force, between these parties and also within them. In the first case, the disappearance of Unides Podem from the institutions, especially from the Valencian Parliament, and the alliances prior to 23J between Compromís and Sumar, has opened an immense abyss between the Valencian coalition and the PSPV. The decision of the Socialists not to give up a seat in the Valencian Parliament Board to their former partners is part of a new context, in which both formations are going to compete for common spaces in the next electoral appointment, seeking an exclusive role in their work opposition to the new government of the PP and Vox. But this is only a specific fact; the mutual attacks that can be verified in the digital universe aggravate what has been said, where many are blamed for the failure of 28-M. Only a few alliances at the local level maintain the memory of a Pacte del Botànic that represented a new and original formula in Spain and that was even emulated by the Government of Spain. The case of Unides Podem deserves an exclusive chapter: its deterioration in the electoral market has installed Podem, especially, in the field of marginality in the Valencian Community. Despite this, some of its prominent militants continue to persist in some of the serious errors that also led them to cause not a little discomfort among the Valencian media.
It is even more surprising that the PSPV, which obtained a better result compared to 2019, has entered the phase of internal fracture so quickly and is struggling to control the crossing of the desert and establish new leadership, even questioning Ximo Puig. The details of what happened in the last days are already known and it is not necessary to remember them all; but the discouragement of defeat has inevitably added to the uncertainty of who and how he is going to lead the party over the next few years, generational conflict included. The matter deserves special attention, since it goes beyond the Valencian initials and enters fully into the crisis of social democracy, its difficulty in responding to the uncertainties and fears that have taken hold in society and a historical situation in which the rights are winning the cultural combat and the symbolic combat. As my colleague Carles Castro pointed out, management no longer defines an electoral result; Other elements dominate the collective imagination. While answers to this reality are sought, the Valencian left have issued their grudges, against others and against themselves, which, as happened in 1995, could excessively lengthen a possible? recovery.
