Napoleon is credited with saying that three things are needed to win any war: money, money, and money. Courage, as is often proclaimed in the military, even if such an assertion is not true, is taken for granted. With money it can be faked and even bought. You know: everything is for sale. It is known how the battles begin, but their end has an uncertain profile. An unavoidable blind spot. Contests are influenced by environmental, material and spiritual factors, in addition to the (fateful) imponderables.
The Andalusian Socialists, submerged in the cesspool of 19J, which gave Moreno Bonilla an absolute majority while turning Vox into an irrelevant actor, leaving them with no real capacity for parliamentary influence and no substantive arguments to erode the PP, they face local elections in nine months that will end up defining the status quo in the great autonomy of southern Spain. To this appointment with the polls in 2023 they will arrive with little funds, with punished morale and without favorable omens. Hopeless.
The fence against the Moncloa increases, inflation does not let up and the economic forecasts for the fall are catastrophic. An optimist would define this situation as the scenario of a perfect storm. A realist calls things by their name: the PSOE in Andalusia is right now a castaway lost on the high seas, with no timber to take refuge in and no coast in sight. The wind blows and the sun burns. There is not, as Houellebecq would say, the possibility of an island. If you look in the direction you look at, you can only glimpse a vast ocean of salt water.
The 28M worries the socialists because their metals interpret the score of the Apocalypse. The 19J has already set the scene of power in the South, with the right enjoying the hegemony that the PSOE squandered, whose categorical closure, to use the concept invented by the philosopher Gustavo Bueno, has its great ritual in the municipal elections. The decisive moment.
That expectations are critical for the PSOE is shown by the fact that Juan Espadas, Ferraz’s man, has chosen to keep his seat in the Senate – while he is a deputy in the regional Parliament – ??just in case, between now and the general elections in December next year, the seventh trumpet of the evangelist Saint John sounds. Whatever happens, he will thus be guaranteed a public salary in the Upper House until 2026, by appearing as a regional senator. His future has been linked to what happens to Sánchez, much weaker since 19J.
This certainty, which is not only demoscopic, is amplified by two facts. First: the majority of socialist mayors in Andalusia are going to carry out the municipal campaign in a very local key, marking obvious distances with Sánchez and completely dispensing with Espadas. Second: in the last conclaves and the meetings of the groups, the last devoted Susanids (residual supporters of the former president of the Board) are trying to articulate, for the moment with very little success, a front in case the waters change direction.
More worrying seems the war scenario that can precipitate the sentence for the ERE scandal. The patriarchs of Suresnes demand an automatic pardon from Moncloa in favor of Griñán, which should be understood as a direct call to attention to the Prime Minister. If Sánchez falls, it is doubtful that Susanism will be resurrected. What is certain is that the old guard of the PSOE, through an alternative candidate, will try to regain control of the Ferraz apparatus. The demand for pardon is clearly a warning to navigators.
The federal leadership, recently purged to give entry to Sánchez’s last circle of trust, has decided to avoid the experiments. In fact, it has just given the green light to the general secretary of the Andalusian PSOE, elected through primaries, so that he dispenses with them when designating the great candidates for mayor. The exception is included in the party’s statutes, but it is still a contradiction: at the same time that Espadas speaks of the urgency of “reconnecting” with society and “focusing the party on Andalusia”, the socialist nomenclature is closed more and more in itself. Autarky, in any war, is always a defensive move, not an offensive one.
The Socialists have incurred in these two months in nursery school errors: in Seville, Antonio Muñoz, substitute for Espadas in the consistory and recently confirmed candidate for Mayor, has dynamited his electoral options by felling, in collusion with the Church and against a judicial decision, a centenary tree in San Jacinto (Triana). The episode, far from being anecdotal, went viral on social networks. Citizen outrage, aware of climate change, already equates Muñoz with Ayuso, considering him an arboricide dedicated to the interests of the hotel and catering sectors. It is not a promising electoral start.
In San Telmo, on the other hand, the municipal race is considered the ideal finishing touch after the triumph of 19J. What for the PSOE is its last line of defense, the remnants that remain once its institutional power has been lost, for Moreno Bonilla means the stabilization of the imperium. The 28M should confirm the conversion of him into the new Octavio Augusto. That is why the Socialists must imperatively retain the majority in the 458 municipalities (58% of the total) that they still direct and the six provincial councils that they preside over.
Any setback on 28M would imply a serious risk of territorial dismantling of the party in Andalusia. In the model of socialist power, based on family clientelism, the control of provincial and local groups depends a lot on the transfer of people between the organic and the representative. For the PP, based in the Quirinale and with a calm horizon of four years, the municipal ones mean more political capillarity, greater territorial control and total hegemony. A possible collapse of the PSOE would leave it without a nemesis.
His great challenge is to preserve the socialist vote – mostly borrowed – achieved on 19J. The low weight of Vox at the local level and the disappearance of Cs make a remake of the regional ones difficult. It is not likely that the same political photo will be repeated, but the general trend is, which indicates that the popular ones are on the rise while the PSOE lives its twilight.
The Socialists, after losing the Board in 2018, managed in the municipal elections almost four years ago to maintain an electoral distance of ten points with respect to the PP. The unification of the conservative vote in a single candidacy, in parallel with the fragmentation of the parties located to the left of the PSOE, has completely altered this situation. If the results were extrapolated from the regional ones to the municipal ones, Espadas would lose the six councils and the four capitals that the socialists have: Granada, Jaén, Huelva and Seville.
The conservative wave has grown exponentially at the local level, where the PP starts with a consolidated share of power of around 40%, with more than 200 mayors. Especially in Eastern Andalusia and on the coast. In the big cities the popular already double the socialists –it happens in Córdoba or Málaga– and in squares as symbolic as Seville, the most important city hall in the hands of the PSOE, the socialists fear not being able to mobilize their electorate. If he loses the Mayor’s Office, Swords’ return to regional politics could not be more dire: not only does he not recover the Board, but he also loses the town hall. Epic Fail.
It will not be easy for the socialists to maintain coalition governments either. The confluence of Yolanda Díaz, who already crashed on 19J, has announced that she will not attend these elections with the Sumar brand. Teresa Rodríguez’s neo-Andalusists, who govern in the capital of Cádiz, will attend alone. The alliance between Podemos and IU also founders. The purples, in their best moments, never managed to establish themselves at the local level. Now they demand to appear with their identity in the candidacies. The communists are not willing to share their presence with them in the sixty municipalities where they have councillors. Sociologically, both are in clear decline. Their war is civil. And he just resists.
