On Sunday night the count of the municipal ballot box will be known first. And there the updated data from the PSOE and the Popular Party, which continue to receive demographic information even though it cannot be published, coincide in recognizing the PP as the list that will get the most votes in these elections at the national level. In 2019, the PP came to lose the municipal elections by more than 1.5 million votes and now they hope to surpass the Socialists by more than half a million ballots: the total transfer, therefore, would be around two million votes.
But the photograph that remains on the night of 28-M, that map, in theory, in blue, will be corrected in the following weeks by the post-electoral pacts. And before entering into this process, the popular leadership will make official to the PSOE a proposal for a great national agreement to guarantee the investiture of the most voted list, thinking, mainly, in the regional key and also the general ones. It could be formalized on the same election night, with the vote count already in process.
The idea that the list with the most votes should govern has been agitating in the new leadership of the party for months, preparing the proposal that they will formally dress next Sunday, in a direct question to the Socialists and Pedro Sánchez.
It is not a minor issue, although both sides of the board consider it amortized and without any route, since, depending on the result left by the polls, this proposal could alter the future of communities as emblematic as Castilla-La Mancha or Valencia. Emiliano García-Page can achieve an absolute majority or he can be the list with the most votes on election night, which would open the door to a PP-Vox government: the scenario in the Junta continues to be very tight and subject to uncertainty four days after the vote. And in Valencia something similar can happen, but alternating the terms of the equation: that the popular ones win the elections, but, with Podemos within Parliament, they do not add up to an absolute majority with Vox.
Even if it stays in a toast to the sun, the PP leadership will verbalize this proposal because, even if it does not prosper, it will serve as an alibi to later be able to maintain before public opinion that the agreements they reach with Vox are the responsibility of the PSOE. Behind, the key that moves everything is the decisive battle for the story, in which the fight will begin as soon as the polling stations close on Sunday.
The PP is going to redouble in this final stretch of the campaign the calls for the useful vote and does not give clues, even among the upper echelons of the party, about how it will manage its relationship with Vox from 29-M. Off, in the environment of the popular president, they lower the ability of the “greens” to influence and prefer to steer the debate towards the idea that, if they need Abascal’s votes, they will force this party to “take a picture” and choose between let the left govern or facilitate an Executive of the PP. But from the direction of Vox they have already begun to heat the pre-campaign with the same pattern that they followed in the last Andalusian elections, despite the fact that in that case it did not serve to stop the majority of Juan Manuel Moreno at the head of the Junta.
In public, and in private, they are already dropping the message that, even for a single regional councilor or deputy, they will demand to enter the new governments. It is an ordeal that will have to be seen if they are later able to sustain the negotiation, because the difference in votes between PP and Vox is a variable that, objectively, has to weigh in the discussion to form a new government.
In any case, it is a fact that Vox will sit at the negotiating table demanding “armchairs”, and the way in which this fight is settled can influence the position with which the two parties, PP and Vox, face the next general elections.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo is faced with a situation that forces him to portray himself with respect to the critical position that he has always maintained up to now regarding the identification of the PP with Vox’s proposals or alliances with them. From the Presidency of the Xunta, he always claimed the independence and autonomy of the PP, and did not look favorably on the approaches of the previous leadership to the initials of Abascal.
Until now, it has remained consistent with its previous positions and has opted for a leadership without complexes and in which the PP has stopped looking in the rear-view mirror at the decisions of its competitors in the bloc on the right. But these elections are his Rubicon, after the PP-Vox coalition agreement in Castilla y León was accelerated, precisely, to leave it closed before he officially assumed the Presidency of the PP. It was the way to prevent him from “staining” with one of the legacies from Pablo Casado’s stage. Now, if he wants to remain consistent with what he has defended when he was a baron of the party and not a national leader, Feijóo cannot impose on his candidates, if there is no consensus, the criteria of ceding governments to the left if Vox does not move in that way. demand that to support investitures he wants to claim positions of power.
This Sunday the resistance capacity of the PSOE and the strength of the change that the PP claims are being measured. And the global result and the particular results in each territory will leave room for interpretations, to the point that it is possible that the analysis moves in the terms that the PP advances, but the PSOE resists; or the PP wins, but the PSOE does not lose. This is Moncloa’s objective.
