Full uncertainty. One of the strangest and most toxic campaigns in recent years closed this Friday with hundreds of politicians throughout Spain holding their breath. In the headquarters of the parties, the autonomies at stake —12— and the town halls —8,131— there is an atmosphere of enormous concern with a result that, due to small differences, can go from fiasco to success. The two great protagonists of a campaign with a strong national content, because it is difficult not to see it as a first round of the December general elections, Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo threw the rest in the key places, where the reading of elections in which the PSOE plays to resist and the PP to seize power, with a very muddy end to the campaign.
The President of the Government went to Barcelona, where the Socialists hope to give the bell and recover the mayoralty 12 years after losing in 2011, the year of the debacle of the left in the midst of the economic crisis, which was one of its star squares. With a large rally with the presence of former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Socialists forced the machine, aware that winning in Barcelona could compensate for other bad news from a full electoral night full of unknowns. Catalonia is the refuge of the socialists, almost the only place where it has a serious chance of growing and where they are doing better than in 2019.
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Meanwhile, Feijóo went to Valencia in the morning, the jewel in the crown, where he hopes to wrest the capital and autonomy from the left to symbolize the recovery of the PP and above all to plug the right and demoralize the left with the feeling that the wave will already be unstoppable also for the generals. In reality, no survey predicts that or large land movements, but small alterations can give the PP a lot of power and take it away from the PSOE and its partners, who achieved many autonomies for the minimum in 2019 -like the Valencian one- and now run the risk of lose them simply if some small groups are left out of parliaments or city halls.
There is another battle, which is the total number of votes in municipal, but the most important will be the distribution of power. Although the Socialists are still confident that they can beat the PP in the number of votes, it is a challenge that seems difficult. If they succeeded, it would be a resounding success for Sánchez and a major fiasco for the popular. Feijóo assumes that he will have more votes than the PSOE. The 2019 result gives a clue. The PSOE then won the PP, at the worst moment in its recent history, by 1.6 million votes. But that day Ciudadanos had 1.8 million, which the PP aspires to recover almost in its entirety. That added to a normal recovery of the popular in these years after reaching the ground of 2019 and a natural wear and tear of the socialists after five years of Government and its zenith that same year means that the PP has that victory within reach. A failure there would be very hard for Feijóo.
But to really succeed, the leader of the PP is not enough with that. He needs to win in the Valencian Community and wrest some other autonomy and several provincial capitals from the PSOE. The popular believe that this objective has also been practically achieved, although in the PP there are always those who fear a last-minute mobilization of the left that will ruin the party for them.
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Feijóo closed the campaign in Madrid with Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who aspires to an absolute majority. In the PP there was an atmosphere of irrepressible euphoria. Its leaders are convinced not only that they will sweep Madrid, where it is easier for them due to the historical weakness of the left in this community, but that they will recover several key autonomies and city councils thanks to this end of campaign absolutely muddy by purchase scandals. of votes that have affected the PSOE above all in several small towns, where there have been several socialists arrested and already expelled.
The PP also has several complaints of irregularities, always in very sparsely populated municipalities, but the most serious news has affected the Socialists and has destroyed the strategy of La Moncloa, which designed a campaign focused on content, advertisements, debates on management of the government in housing, health, education, parity, which was at all times overshadowed by different scandals: first, the Bildu lists; later, the vote by mail in Melilla; and finally the waterfall of little explosive news in different towns.
The PP was so euphoric that Ayuso, with Feijóo sitting in the front row, launched one of his Trumpian phrases that left their leader with no space to even try to match it. “Sánchez is going to leave as he arrived, with an attempted punch. He doesn’t even vote for Txapote anymore ”, he launched it to great applause. Ayuso did not give more details, but Sánchez came to power with a motion of no confidence that the PP was politically outraged, but none of the popular leaders -yes those of Vox- had ever questioned the legitimacy of a constitutional mechanism that Mariano himself Rajoy recognized when he was defeated in Congress. Ayuso’s environment points out that the president was referring to the controversy over the polls behind a curtain in the stormy Federal Committee of the PSOE on October 1, 2016. But that day Sánchez was dismissed, he did not come to power, rather he left he. He had come to the leadership of the PSOE in 2014 with some primaries and in 2017, a few months after his dismissal, he won another. “One more week and they do not have a crime left for touching the PSOE: kidnapping, harassment, gang membership, buying ballots, even exchanging ballots for paper sheets,” the Madrid president gloated.
Faced with this barrage, Feijóo, who also appealed to anti-Sanchismo, was left out of profile: “I have come to ask the vote of Spain that wants to repeal Sanchismo from this very Sunday,” said the PP leader, who went back into a garden with soccer: “despite being from Atlético de Madrid, he knows how to win,” he said of the mayor, José Luis Martínez Almeida. “This party respects minorities,” he finished trying to fix it.
The Socialists are devastated by this end of the campaign, totally different from what their strategists thought, but Sánchez tried in the final stretch to turn around a very complicated environment by encouraging all progressives to mobilize massively to prevent a “muddy” campaign from winning. ”of which he accuses the PP. “Those who want to hit the ball with housing or those who seek to do business with health and education do not want us to vote. That is why they insult, disqualify and muddy politics, to demobilize people. Let’s respond with a massive vote for the PSOE, because the stronger the PSOE is, the stronger the welfare state will be,” Sánchez summed up.
“Those of the PP seem to be waiting for a UFO to appear tomorrow to put it in the campaign and say that Pedro Sánchez is to blame,” Zapatero joked. The former president recalled all the positive data from Sánchez’s management and launched: “Can you imagine what they would say if all that happened with the right in the Government? What would they say? Well no, the left is doing it, with Pedro Sánchez. What happens is that the right intimidates, exaggerates. But the PSOE is not going to be intimidated by the PP and even less by the president, because he has the full support of the entire PSOE, ”he said, looking at Sánchez.
The president made one last attempt in his content campaign in Barcelona, with data on his management, the economic situation, the reforms carried out, with a strong idea: “Social democratic policies suit Spain very well.” The PSOE thus maintained its strategy until the last minute of the campaign to try to get people to talk about its management. The PP completely changed it and took advantage of the news that appeared —Bildu, vote-by-mail scandal— to launch into a whirlwind against the PSOE and try to demobilize the left. On Sunday night it will be known who was more successful.
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