Scientists say our solar system formed randomly from a colossal accumulation of gases and space debris. The sun god burns every day without being consumed. The planets (and their satellites) revolve around it, while they rotate on themselves. What seems still is in perpetual motion. The hypothetical original chaos of the galaxy responds, be it by a miracle or due to chance, to a certain criterion of order.
In politics there is a similar phenomenon: political parties never stop moving, be it from the organic or social point of view. Each election is experienced as a critical moment. In the great autonomy of the South – six million voters – the outcome of 23J will be a crucial moment. 17.42% of the deputies who will elect the Prime Minister come from the Spanish South, which has its own army of 41 senators in the Upper House.
It is the moment of inertia. This is the keystone, the sacred ashlar, to understand the imminent general elections in Andalusia. The PP must exhibit the robust political muscle built over the last five years. The PSOE, five years after being expelled from the Junta, losing all the big capitals and six of the eight provincial councils, knows that its survival is settled in this haul. Your future. And, in a certain sense, also its history.
The battle clearly transcends the strict regional political arena. Sanchismo was not exactly born in Andalusia, but without the successive support of Andalusian socialism, first through Susana Díaz (briefly) and, after the Ferraz coup, thanks to the figure of Francisco Toscano, former mayor of Dos Hermanas , their survival is much more difficult.
Far from obeying a passing moment, the social unrest with the coalition government in the South is intense. The 28M was verified in the municipal elections, which buried any desire for resurrection of the PSOE.
At first glance, Andalusia has ceased to be socialist in barely half a decade, which is the period that Moreno Bonilla has been sitting on the Quirinale de San Telmo. First in a rather timid and uncertain way, with an unstable three-way parliamentary majority; later, with the absolute achievement achieved alone by the PP on 19J a year ago now.
We are not facing a sudden conversion or a temporary temporary episode. The institutional hegemony of the new southern right –Vox did not add even 7% of the votes in the municipal elections– is going to be lasting, but it is not supported by reformism or real change. It is based on a skilful exercise in continuity without break. In the substitution through mimesis of the symbolic role that socialists had historically played in Andalusia.
Moreno Bonilla has invented a political pattern capable of encouraging the sociological transit between the left and the right. His tools are ideological relativism and the firm will to stay put, stuck, within the institutions. The Andalusian PP, Feijóo’s main reference, and whose key men control the war apparatus of Genoa, does not seem like the usual PP. It was not even in the three years that he had to lean on Vox and share power with Cs.
Who does Moreno Bonilla look like? Of course, despite the fact that the president of the Board invokes his figure with undoubted enthusiasm, not Adolfo Suárez. The head of the Andalusian PP, just like Manuel Chaves in his day, did not seem to have the capabilities of a leader. And yet, the facts and circumstances have ended up turning it into the North of all compasses.
The comparison between Chaves and Moreno Bonilla is far from being metaphorical. The facts show that the right wing in southern Spain is the dress rehearsal, the vanguard, of a kind of social democracy dressed in blue. Capable of keeping his own constituents, adding the (very few) liberals of Cs and attracting the diaspora of ambivalent Andalusianism into his orbit, including the ancient patriarchs of the Old Testament, quite lacking in affection.
Moreno Bonilla has built from the halls of San Telmo a common house where reactionary Andalusia fits the bourgeois and disillusioned leftists. This alliance (of interests) does not intend to change anything or subvert any heritage. Practice continuity without risk and cherish the inheritance received, while the Andalusian socialists, out of orbit for five years, have become obedient servants of sanchismo.
That the image of the President of the Government is so deteriorated in Andalusia, more than in other constituencies, or that the Yolanda Díaz experiment has no real options to improve the electoral ground achieved by the different masks of communism, is not a singularity. It responds to this evolution of political planets always in motion.
Pedro Sánchez folded the hand of historical socialism, whose roots are in the South, and has directed the torn ship of the PSOE towards one of the corners of the solar system, where the independentists and populists live. Sumar is located where the IU coalition was before. Vox is comfortable with Trumpist extremism, albeit with modest success.
The central axis of the political system (in Andalusia and Spain) has been left completely free. Now it has no owner. And it is there that the political battle of 23J will be fought. It is enough for the PP to prolong the fiction of this new social democracy dressed in blue, and after releasing the master keystone that sustains its power in the South, undertake its final assault on Moncloa.
