“Not even in dreams”. In Moncloa and Ferraz agree that the PP and Vox will not reach this Sunday, not even in the best of possible scenarios for the right-wing bloc, an absolute majority of 176 deputies. “They do not add up”, they settle. And if Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Santiago Abascal do not reach said bar, as the Socialists assure, “many scenarios will open up.”
Even that of the re-election of Pedro Sánchez as president, and the reformulation of a progressive coalition executive with Yolanda Díaz, supported, as in the previous legislature, by a heterogeneous parliamentary majority refractory to any government formula that includes, actively or passively, the extreme right.
In Ferraz they assure that the distance between the PP and the PSOE barely reaches two percentage points in their internal tracking –which would be within the margins of error–, in the last bars of the campaign. “We do not rule out or win in votes and seats,” they encourage. Again on board a mental roller coaster, the socialists once again went from depression to “euphoria”, as they openly admit. “The mobilization on the left is being enormous, we have gone up a lot. But a lot”, they warn.
Sánchez himself claims to be feeling this mobilization daily. This Friday he closed his campaign with a rally in Getafe, before 4,500 supporters. The day before he gathered another 4,000 in Lugo. And he ensured the socialist victory, with the platform of Yolanda Díaz in third position, ahead of Vox, to guarantee another four years of progressive government in Spain.
Two months ago, after losing most of its territorial power in the municipal and regional elections, the PSOE sank into depression. But the advancement of the generals prevented them from even mourning. The new precipitated electoral scenario reactivated the party and its militancy in the pre-campaign, before the final date with the polls on 23-J. But collective morale once again plunged into pessimism after the “fiasco” of the only electoral face-off between Sánchez and Feijóo, on July 10 at Atresmedia.
After a first week of the campaign in which the Socialists failed to take flight, due to this unexpected initial setback, Sánchez really started the engines last weekend, with two rallies in Valencia and Barcelona. “We fell and we got up, we pedaled against the clock, we crossed all the flying goals and we climbed all the unimaginable ports,” Sánchez highlighted this Friday about the socialist campaign. And there are only a few meters left, he encouraged, for the final sprint of 23-J.
Former President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero also reappeared on the scene in this campaign, to agitate and help the PSOE come back. Sánchez demanded this Friday a loud applause for Zapatero, “who is getting out of this campaign.” And the applause was thunderous. How thunderous was the silence that, on the other hand, Felipe González kept in this campaign.
As of last Saturday, in Ferraz they emphasize that they began to register an important “comeback” of their expectations, while the PP, in their opinion, was starring in a last week of “disastrous” campaign, with Feijóo entangled in his “lies” about the revaluation of pensions and his old friendship with the drug trafficker Marcial Dorado. Sánchez also highlighted this Friday the PP’s pacts with Bildu in Vitoria, later corrected, and hopelessly hoped that the news would open the news.
This upward trend of the Socialists, they say, was consolidated in the three-way debate between Sánchez, Yolanda Díaz and the far-right leader, Santiago Abascal, last Wednesday on RTVE. The absence of Feijóo in this appointment, which achieved an audience of more than four million viewers, was a “resounding tactical error” the Socialists point out.
On the other hand, they highlight that Sánchez and Díaz managed to visualize the wickers of a future government coalition between the PSOE and Sumar “very positively”, this time well coordinated and aligned, and without the internal disputes of the alliance with Unidas Podemos that so eroded and tarnished the action of the Executive in this legislature.
Other socialist leaders, however, do not rule out that an insufficient victory for the PP, but without a sufficient alternative from the left, could cause a situation of blockade for the investiture of a new president of the Government. But, until the night of 23-J, everyone crosses their fingers.
