The Galician elections, where Génova – through Alfonso Rueda – has prevailed over the (tacit) coalition between the BNG and the PSOE, plus the addition of Sumar’s failure, whose situation shows the ephemeral future of all the political experiments cooked up in The party headquarters in Madrid state a double circumstance. On the one hand, the PP maintains its share of territorial power, with the exception of Euskadi, Catalonia, La Mancha, the Canary Islands, Asturias and Navarra; on the other, the retreat of the socialists in the autonomies where there is a nationalist impulse or openly independentist political proposals.
The investiture, including the uncertain amnesty, displaced Sánchez’s PSOE from the centrality of the political board. The electoral cost of the shift is the regression of the socialist brand throughout Spain, to the point of sowing doubts about its viability as a long-term organization. Without an effective territorial structure, a party can, in certain circumstances, achieve power or caress for it. It is doubtful, however, that he will be able to keep it for a long time.
It is enough to review the history of Cs and Podemos – which in Galicia have garnered fewer votes than Pacma – to distance ourselves from Madrid’s obstinacy of relativizing the local factor when designing its strategies. The liberal organization, when jumping from Catalonia to the state level, built flood candidacies, with leaders coming from other political forces. The lack of real territorial implementation unraveled the organization when the winds blew against it.
Podemos, on the other hand, grew from its Madrid nucleus through a series of franchises and colonials – Compromís, the Comuns, the PCE – that never respected the terms of a true confluence. Time has made them extraparliamentary in many autonomies; In others, where they are still part of candidacies that they no longer control, they will be so as soon as the vote is held again. The reading that emerges from the Galician elections – the more nationalism, the less socialism – has, however, a divergent reading in Andalusia, where the PSOE lives installed in a decadence that has lasted for five years and that from the political sphere has extended to the social sphere, as shows the recent anecdote of the loss of their booth at the April Fair due to forgetting to pay municipal taxes.
The episode, which means that the socialists will no longer have a social space in Real de Los Remedios for three decades, which is the delay in the list of booth claimants, can only be saved if the PP – which governs the City Council of Seville with a simple majority – grants them an amnesty. But, even in this (ironic) assumption, the political cost that the Moncloa partners are causing in almost all the autonomies will not be diluted.
Nobody has formulated it in public, but many of the veterans of the Andalusian PSOE, once owners and lords of Andalusia, pose the crossroads in these terms: either Sánchez leaves the party converted into a wasteland or the territorial leaders, who have less and less strength , power and autonomy, they rebel against the president, just as happened with Zapatero in his day.
The second does not seem, at least today, to be a viable possibility. The first, on the other hand, is already a fact, although in the case of Andalusia the Galician formula is impossible to conjugate. In the autonomy of the South, the few political parties of nationalist inspiration, which are the ones that now seem to advance to the detriment of the PSOE, are irrelevant or, as is the case in the specific case of Adelante Andalucía, a kind of southern-style CUP, residual.
The absence of left-wing nationalism in the South could give some hope to Andalusian socialists that their situation will be different. His thesis is that his electorate only has one alternative to consummate a hypothetical transfer of votes to the brand located to his left: Por Andalucía, a Sumar franchise created before the break with Podemos
It is a meager consolation, since his electoral defeat is of a different nature. First, because after almost forty years of absolutist hegemony, which will not return, the Andalusian socialists have not only lost the Quirinale (San Telmo), but all their local power – except the councils of Jaén and Seville – and even the compass that in His day led his patriarchs to the Promised Land.
It is not the worst: the most serious wound that the PSOE suffers in Andalusia is that it has stopped being politically relevant – to the benefit of the PSC – in Ferraz. Without this influence in Madrid, the options for renewal of the Andalusian socialists, even if feigned, are unlikely. Their only path is following. They do not have the autonomy to articulate their own message. Its future is therefore linked to Sanchismo, as has been seen after the firm opposition of its great historical references –González, Guerra, Borbolla– to the amnesty.
Secondly, the fact is that the person who has taken advantage of the electoral quota of the few political brands with a regionalist profile is the PP of Moreno Bonilla, which has not only assumed and mimicked – in a new bottle – what the PSOE represented Andalusia for four decades, but has welcomed under its protective mantle the Andalusian minorities who between 1996 and 2000, when Chaves was left without an absolute majority, helped the PSOE maintain the Junta thanks to a coalition government with the regionalists.
This formula, which is what the PSOE cherished in Galicia, is not going to happen in Andalusia, where the Andalusians are not even part of Parliament and their historical leaders, such as Alejandro Rojas Marcos, have stood alongside the PP. The improbable recovery of the PSOE in the South no longer depends on an improbable growth on the left. It requires the decline of Sánchez. And his great disappointment is that, if this hypothesis one day becomes a reality, it may be too late and socialist Andalusia will have already become the last taifa kingdom.