“Don’t even dream of it”. In Moncloa and Ferraz agree to assume that the PP and Vox will not achieve this Sunday, even in the best possible scenario for the right-wing bloc, an absolute majority of 176 deputies. “They don’t add up”, they conclude. And if Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Santiago Abascal do not reach this bar, as the socialists say, “many scenarios open up”.
Even the re-election of Pedro Sánchez as president, and the reformulation of a progressive coalition executive with Yolanda Díaz, with the support, as in the previous legislature, of a heterogeneous parliamentary majority refractory to any form of government that includes, either actively or passively, the ultra-right.
A Ferraz assures that the distance between the PP and the PSOE barely reaches two percentage points in their internal follow-up studies – something that would be within the margins of error -, in the last stages of the campaign. “We do not rule out winning in votes and seats”, they proclaimed. Once again aboard an emotional roller coaster, the socialists once again went from depression to “euphoria”, as they bluntly admit. “The mobilization on the left is being huge, we are going up a lot, but a lot”, they warn.
Sánchez himself assures that he is feeling this mobilization on a daily basis. Yesterday he closed his campaign with a rally in Getafe, in front of 4,500 supporters. The day before he gathered 4,000 in Lugo. And he secured the socialist victory, with Yolanda Díaz’s platform in third place, ahead of Vox, to guarantee four more years of progressive government in Spain.
Two months ago, after losing most of its territorial power in the municipal and regional elections, the PSOE sank into depression. But the advance of the generals did not let them pass the mourning. The new hasty electoral scenario reactivated the party and its militancy in the pre-campaign, before the final appointment with the ballot boxes on 23-J. But collective morale fell back into pessimism after the “fiasco” of the only electoral face-to-face between Sánchez and Feijóo, on the 10th in Atresmedia.
After a first week of the campaign in which the Socialists failed to get back on the flight, due to this unforeseen initial hitch, Sánchez really started the engines last weekend, with the meetings in Valencia and Barcelona. “We fell and we got up, we pedaled against the clock, we crossed all the flying goals and we climbed all the unimaginable ports”, highlighted Sánchez yesterday about the socialist campaign. And there are only a few meters left, he said, for the final sprint of the 23-J.
Former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero also reappeared on the scene in this campaign, to shake up and help the PSOE get back together. Sánchez claimed yesterday a loud round of applause for Zapatero, “who is unstoppable in this campaign”. And the applause was deafening. How deafening was the silence that Felipe González has maintained in this campaign.
From last Saturday, Ferraz noted that they began to register an important “upturn” in their expectations, while the PP, in their opinion, was leading the last week of a “disastrous” campaign, with Feijóo entangled in his “lies” about the revaluation of pensions and his former friendship with the drug trafficker Marcial Dorado. Sánchez also underlined yesterday the pacts of the PP with Bildu in Vitoria, later corrected, and he hoped without hope that the news would open news.
This upward trend of the socialists, they say, was consolidated in the three-way debate between Sánchez, Yolanda Díaz and the leader of the far-right, Santiago Abascal, on RTVE on Wednesday. The absence of Feijóo in this meeting, which achieved an audience of more than four million viewers, was a “glaring tactical error”, the socialists point out.
On the other hand, they emphasize that Sánchez and Díaz managed to visualize “very positively” the elements of a future government coalition between the PSOE and Sumar, this time well coordinated and aligned.
Other socialist leaders, however, do not rule out that an insufficient victory for the PP, but without a sufficient alternative from the left, will cause a blocking situation for the investiture of a new president of the government. Everyone is crossing their fingers.
