We may lose the battle, once again. I understood it when last Wednesday almost all the digital editions of the media that I consulted offered a “live dialogue” of the debate on the regional elections offered by TeleMadrid (will they do the same with the one of the Valencian candidates that will be held on the 25th? of May?). Once finished, those same media dedicated wide spaces, and repeated analyzes, to what was said by Ayuso and his rivals, who were all of them. It is being a constant throughout the campaign, the president of the Community of Madrid is the great protagonist of this 28M at an organic level and, also, the great agitator of the vote of the right and the extreme right, dwarfing Feijóo even comically. In the media ecosystem, the political periphery has blurred, except for the Basque one due to the controversy over the Bildu lists, a matter in which Ayuso has once again established herself as the necessary leader to hyperbolize the campaign. She can do it.

Everything else, the announcements, the regional and local problems, the real needs, those that define our condition as citizens of a State, of its administration, have remained in the background or, on occasions, have disappeared from the public debate. The analogue space, very limited, and the digital one, infinite, have fervently welcomed surrendering to radio conflicts and abandoning the peripherals, because that’s what they were designed for. The PP is happy, the same PP that defends that defeating the left in the Valencian Community is not an objective in itself, but that it only makes sense as a necessary step to “defeat sanchismo”, an idea reiterated in each act without being get to specify what it is that they want to defeat. And the Valencian left, as an example, is looking for resources to alleviate the effects of a storm that travels at the speed of tweets and that is turning Valencia into a yellow jersey stage: the important thing is the final goal, the Spanish Government. That is the biggest problem for Ximo Puig and Joan Baldoví, and they know it.

The program can go well for the PP or it can suffer a hypothetical boomerang effect, that so much excitement turns against it; everything is possible. But these days I listen to analysts and experts and, although without certainties, the threats to the peripheries are growing. Can you compete by talking about building schools or creating green spaces in the face of intensive use by ETA victims or the intolerable inclusion of exetarras on Bildu’s lists? Digital communication is not prone to extensive reasoning, it is more of short, explosive, emotional headlines; the rational vote loses on these occasions. Very primitive instincts are being mobilized, red lines are being crossed that imply long consensuses that have been blown up; All this, in the end, only benefits those who least tolerate the State. Illiberalism in full expansion.

What will we Valencians and Valencians vote next Sunday? 28M will pass and certain shock waves will end up weakened, and we will once again face a day to day where the epicenters lose all their ability to influence and where we want to be demanding with our managers, local and administrative, but it is already too late . The Valencian PP and the PSPV, and the rest of the parties, should be the first interested in collaborating so that the universe lit up on the airwaves and the digital platforms does not end up turning our periphery into a wasteland, in political terms. It is not an exaggeration.