What will remain of these elections beyond the result?
That they are the end of the cycle that began in 2014, due to the exhaustion of corruption and the recession, which questioned the bipartisanship with tides, the process and the appearance of Ciudadanos and Podemos.
After 10 years, what is left of 2014?
With finite Ciudadanos and Podemos diluted in the amalgamation – today 12 parties – usual in the Spanish left, the PSOE still asserts its permanence, roots and identity in it…
Who will come out better from these ballot boxes: Pedro Sánchez or the PSOE?
Thanks to this robustness, the PSOE, even losing, can now obtain a percentage of votes similar to that of 2019, which was 28.25%.
Why hasn’t Pedro Sánchez worked against everyone?
It is shocking how badly he designs the campaign, because his government’s policies were more popular than his president and, nevertheless, he does not talk about what he has done, but instead attacks what the PP would do, and thus gives him the initiative.
Has Sánchez believed his own legend?
The municipal ones of 28-M had already shown that it was a mistake to raise them as a personal plebiscite; but Sánchez has not known how to rectify and value his government work and that of his ministers against Feijóo.
For example?
When the polls tell you that you are losing votes to the PP, why don’t you give prominence to Minister Margarita Robles, highly valued by the right?
Will the useful vote for the PP not harm Vox?
Vox was born in 2018, because the new parties did not know how to channel the malaise of the right and now it shows that Spain has the same problems as the mature European democracies: the tailwind that benefits the new extreme right…
But will it ultimately deflate at the polls?
Polls say that 15% of Vox voters are already returning to the PP; because Feijóo is capable – Married he was not – of stealing votes from Vox; but what is relevant is that he, at the same time, steals the conservative vote from the PSOE.
Does the center win again?
This analysis is incomplete without the other great piece: Andalusia. You cannot get a synthesis of Spain to expand to the right and left without that engine of sociological change that is Andalusia turning to the right.
Why is the Spanish south going to the right?
Because there the PSOE was already more conservative than in the rest of Spain and much more than in Catalonia and, furthermore, the territorial polarization with the procès and Bildu have made it tilt to the right, and thus all of Spain.
Can Andalusia give Moncloa to the PP?
The incredible electoral strength of the PSOE until today emanated from the Andalusia-Catalonia axis, which made the party the closest thing to Spain itself in that intimate, cultural, ideological connection between territories.
You lived in Barcelona and speak Catalan.
And I saw Ibarra, Bono and Pasqual Maragall sitting at the same table under the same initials, but today that synthesis has been broken and now perhaps the PSC will recover; but in Castilla-La Mancha, Galicia or Valencia it is the right –with the key to Andalusia– that today imposes its axis.
Doesn’t it all depend on participation?
In other elections, polarization activated participation, but in these the left is unmotivated –in polls, eight points more abstention than in the right–, and the abstentionist majority is between PSOE and Sumar.
And the pro-independence abstentionism?
It continues to increase, as was verified in the municipal ones in the Basque Country and Catalonia.
To what do you attribute it?
The indepe is disappointed with the legislature and turns his anger into inhibition.
How much worse – a PP-Vox government – ??do you think it will be better to revive the process?
This calculation is self-flagelating and myopic compared to the constructive pulse of PNV and Bildu for being the Basque interlocutor who takes things to Madrid. And that abstentionists should be careful, because at worst the Constitution, which today seems like a prison, ends up being the last parapet of self-government.
And if Vox achieves the 50 deputies that allow him unconstitutionality appeals?
They are key, and remember that it was a Vox resource, not the PP, that brought down the state of alarm. And attention, because today in Spain there is a third that wants more self-government; another who wants autonomies like now and the other who aspires to recentralization.
Isn’t Vox more Spanish than European?
AfD or Le Pen or the Fratelli fight immigration and their enemy is abroad; For Vox, the enemy is internal: peripheral nationalisms, progressive ideology… It is the reaction of Spanish nationalism, which goes beyond Rajoy’s conservatism: they are reactionaries.
Is that why they want culture and agriculture?
Because that reactionary vote is built on the idealization of an idyllic past, the countryside and its values, unitary, orderly and just –also culture: moral and ethical– that never existed.
