Victory has many parents, as often happens in politics, while defeat is an orphan. Yesterday Pedro Sánchez gathered the PSOE federal executive to take stock of the damage suffered by the electoral fall in Galicia. And, as communicated by its spokeswoman, Esther Peña, the conclusion is that the result responded to indigenous territorial criteria, not in a state key. Without the scrutiny reflecting, therefore, a vote of punishment for Sánchez or his policies or alliances at the head of the Spanish Government.
Nor for the controversial Amnesty law, still under discussion between the PSOE and Junts, which according to Peña “has not been a factor that has defined or influenced the results”. The proof that the amnesty did not interfere in the 18-F, the socialist spokeswoman alleged, is that the BNG grew like foam and took a large part of the vote from the PSdeG, although the formation of Ana Pontón “clearly supports the amnesty and is a sovereignist”.
The management of Ferraz wanted to assume the bad results. “We don’t want and we can’t stop self-criticism”, admitted Peña after the drop in votes and seats. “The PSOE does not hide when it receives a setback”, he assured.
But those who do not console themselves are because they do not want to, and the socialist spokeswoman assured that, despite 14% of the vote obtained by the candidacy of José Ramón Gómez Besteiro, “we are not residual in any autonomous community”. And he recalled that the PP, on the other hand, barely reached 6% of the vote in Euskadi and 4% in Catalonia in the last dates with the ballot boxes. These are precisely the next regional elections scheduled on the calendar. “We will meet again there”, challenged Peña to the PP, for the future Basque and Catalan elections.
“We understand the euphoria of the PP”, admitted the spokeswoman, after Feijóo’s party was “in shock” since it failed to govern after the general elections. “The PP needed joy”, he quipped. “But these data are irrefutable”, he insisted, regarding the poor electoral results of the PP in Euskadi and Catalonia.
Excluding the amnesty and Sánchez’s agreements with Catalan independence, Ferraz attributes the electoral fall in Galicia to three causes. First of all, in the short time that Besteiro had to consolidate himself as an alternative, after seven years out of the game due to judicial imputations that ultimately came to nothing, in the face of the electoral advance that Alfonso Rueda caused to revalidate the position
A time that the PSOE assured that it lacked Besteiro and had enough of Pontón, after many years of “stone grinding” in Galicia, which resulted in the “strong power” of the BNG at the polls. Thus, they count as a second reason the “obvious flow of votes” to the BNG, which left the PSdeG in its worst historical record. The third reason they put forward is the proven “resilience” of the PP in its stronghold, which this time benefited from an extra mobilization of its electorate against the BNG.
Sánchez, in any case, shielded Besteiro after the electoral fiasco, and demanded to consolidate the territorial leaderships. “We believe in medium and long-term projects, a political option needs time to filter into society”, Peña emphasized, who pointed out Besteiro as a “natural leader” of Galician socialism. “The fundamental key to regaining trust is long-term projects.” And he wielded another saying to prop up Besteiro: “The land, for whom it is worked”.
