“There is no color,” Pedro Sánchez warned yesterday, once again dressed in his campaign suit. “I prefer the Europe of Pepe Borrell, Nadia Calviño and Teresa Ribera. I do not want the Europe of Aznar, Ayuso, Feijóo and Abascal, and that is why we have to go out and win the elections on June 9,” he cried, putting the political adversary to beat in the same bag. Which, ultimately, is the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
Having already overcome the parenthesis of the five days in April in which he left his mandate in suspense, Sánchez returned to the electoral arena yesterday – at the start of the socialist campaign in Valencia – with the aim of stopping the growth of the right and the extreme right in Europe and in Spain. At the internal level, the intention of the PSOE is to deal a definitive blow to Feijóo’s leadership in the PP that, at the same time, helps to clear the uncertain course of a legislature that is still pending the formation of a new Government in Catalonia.
Despite the fact that just yesterday Sánchez had to withdraw the Land bill due to lack of parliamentary support – and avoid another defeat in Congress in just 48 hours, after the rejection of the bill to abolish prostitution – the president is reinforced to face the European elections thanks to the “backing” of the Catalan elections of May 12, with an “incontestable” victory of Salvador Illa as an endorsement of the reunion agenda in Catalonia and the Amnesty law, which is expected to see the final green light on May 30, in the middle of the European campaign. “Is Spain broken? But Salvador Illa has won in Catalonia! ”He congratulated himself yesterday.
Two days before the expected approval of the amnesty, on May 28, the Government will approve the recognition of the Palestinian State, which encourages the clash with the Israeli Beniamin Netanyahu while Sánchez maintains the political and diplomatic battle with the Argentine Javier Milei. Both issues, in any case, charge the batteries of the socialist campaign, and Ferraz trusts that they will operate as a “revulsive” to mobilize the progressive electorate.
Yesterday Sánchez made the electoral flag of the next recognition of Palestine. And he rebuked the broadside of the Madrid president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who portrayed him as a “friend of terrorists.” “We are on the right side of history,” she said to great applause at the rally.
In Moncloa and Ferraz they highlight the “lowering of expectations” of the PP in the face of 9-J. Just a few months ago, they remember that the PP opted to “double” the PSOE in seats, but now they have significantly reduced their electoral prospects. To the point that the socialists consider that, if Feijóo proposed these European elections as a plebiscite on the President of the Government, now the 9-J can be a plebiscite on his leadership in the PP. “Maybe the person who has an internal problem on June 10 is the PP,” they trust Ferraz.
The socialist objective is to once again mobilize the progressive electorate, in European elections that traditionally register a high abstention, with the warning of the rise of the right and the extreme right. This strategy already worked for Sánchez in the general elections of July 2023, when the demoscopy predicted a PP and Vox government, and he added almost a million more votes than in 2019.
The leader of the PSOE highlighted it yesterday in Valencia. “On July 23, we all voted en masse for four more years of a progressive coalition government and to stop the reactionary coalition government between Feijóo and Abascal. If we didn’t want that for Spain, let’s not want it for Europe,” he demanded.
And he focused his speech, again, on asking for the vote “so that the reactionary coalition of the PP with Vox, in Spain and in Europe, retreats.” Sánchez took advantage of the fact that, in her first television face-to-face, the PP candidate, Dolors Montserrat, did not rule out an alliance of the right and the extreme right in the European institutions, no matter how much the PSOE leader, Teresa, demanded it. Riverbank. “They did not clarify whether or not they are going to agree with the extreme right, with the European Vox. And if they did not clarify it, it is because they are clear that they are going to do it,” she stated.
And with Milei, at the head of an “extreme right-wing international”, as a sudden electoral hook for the PSOE. Sánchez denounced the diatribes of the Argentine president, who assured that “social justice is an aberration.” “That is the great conquest of Spain!” replied the leader of the PSOE. “The aberration is to defend a political project that interests only the privilege of a minority, hiding behind a false flag of freedom, which is what the extreme right and its allies on the right do.”
And he recalled the management of the financial crisis ten years ago. “Europe staggered under the scissors of the men in black,” she warned. And he warned that now those men in black from “austericide” could return, but “accompanied by the chainsaw of the extreme right.”