New year, new electoral cycle. Once the presidency of the Government has been revalidated, and with the legislature underway despite its multiple uncertainties, Pedro Sánchez will face the course of 2024, as always throughout his entire political career, dressed in his campaign suit. And with three electoral dates, at least, highlighted on the calendar: the Galician ones on February 18, the Basque ones scheduled for the spring and the European ones on June 9.
After reinforcing the political and technical profile of the Government, with the remodeling that he carried out on Friday, Sánchez sees the time to now also strengthen the PSOE, with replacements in the Ferraz executive and an update of the strategy and political project, to face this election cycle. The objective, they say, is to “rearm themselves ideologically.”
No waste of time. The PSOE will hold a political conference on January 20 and 21 in A Coruña – to focus on the first of the elections, in Galicia –, with the aim of renewing its project and ideology. Sánchez will take advantage of the appointment to also call meetings of the party’s federal committee, the highest decision-making body between congresses, and of the federal executive. In both conclaves, the changes that will be made at the top of the party will be proposed and ratified. Many are forced by the formation of the new Government.
To begin with, the spokesperson for the PSOE executive is vacant, after its until now holder, Minister Pilar Alegría, assumed the role of spokesperson in the Executive. It remains to be defined whether the new one will be choral, depending on the topics to be highlighted, or will fall to a single leader.
And several officials will also be relieved, after their recent appointments in the Executive as Secretaries of State or General Directors, among them Arcadi España –until now Secretary of Transportation– or Beatriz Carrillo –Secretary of Social Policies–.
The leader of the Andalusian socialists, Juan Espadas, will join the new executive as spokesperson in the Senate, replacing the Catalan Eva Granados, also appointed Secretary of State, and there will be a change in the representation of the PSC in this body, in which also had Miquel Iceta as secretary of Democratic Memory. Iceta is now Spain’s ambassador to UNESCO.
Sánchez will thus set course for the new electoral cycle. After the socialist disaster of the municipal and regional elections last May, especially in terms of loss of institutional power in communities and city councils, the July general elections recorded a comeback in which the PSOE recovered a million votes. And in Ferraz they warn that in this new legislature, and despite the controversial amnesty for those accused of the procés, “there is not great wear and tear.” In fact, they point out that all polls continue to place them above 30% of the votes, which is beginning to become an exception among European social democratic parties.
At the political conference in A Coruña, the socialist candidate for the Xunta, José Ramón Gómez Besteiro, will have a starring role reserved. In the leadership of the PSOE they believe that they have, in these elections, “the best candidate”, who also unites the Galician socialists after years of internal turbulence.
Its first objective, in this first appointment with the polls of the year, is to articulate a “left-wing majority” that can end the 14 consecutive years of PP governments in the Xunta, first with Alberto Núñez Feijóo and now with his successor, Alfonso Wheel.
Sánchez will try to deal a definitive blow to Feijóo’s leadership in the PP, if the majority of the left manages to dislodge Rueda from the Xunta. In the PSOE they point out that Feijóo left the presidency of the Xunta and took the reins of the PP to be president of the government, but he did not achieve his great electoral objective. “And if the PP now loses Galicia, it will be the worst political move in the last 30 years, it would be an absolute disaster.”
The second objective for the PSOE in these Galician elections is to overtake the BNG, which in 2020, with Ana Pontón, already snatched the leadership of the opposition from it. But in Ferraz they highlight that the priority, in order to dislodge the Popular Party from the Xunta, is to “maximize the results of the left”, so that their candidacies “add and not subtract.” In this sense, the socialists celebrated the pre-agreement announced last Wednesday so that Sumar and Podemos, despite their breakup in Congress, would compete together in the elections. The joy was short-lived. Yesterday the militancy, encouraged by Pablo Iglesias, agreed to turn its back on this agreement.
