Let’s do something very crazy. Let’s start this article with a few words from Santiago Abascal. Even worse. To emphasize that he is not wrong. “Telling the Spanish that Sánchez is going to leave if he loses these elections is scamming the Spanish and I am not going to contribute to that scam,” said the Vox leader. What a way to ruin the PP campaign. Obviously, Abascal is an interested party. The PP desperately needs voters to think that this is not the case. That this time it won’t be like in July. That we are weeks away from Pedro Sánchez biting the dust forever.
In the crazy and fast pace of the Popular Party, anything is possible. No longer the usual strategies of the parties in a campaign to mobilize their supporters and not trust the polls. It’s now or never again. If Feijóo does not win, death and destruction. If you relax, you will have Sánchez morning, noon and night. Is there a greater suffering than that? “If the PP wins clearly, there will be light at the end of the tunnel,” Alberto Núñez Feijóo said this week in an interview. The same metaphor with which the Johnson Government and General Westmoreland deceived the Americans in the Vietnam War. Not once, but many times. Until it stopped working.
The PP has put all its chips in Begoña Gómez’s box with the same discipline as a Marxist-Leninist in the Cold War. He did the same with pardons. Then with Tito Berni. Later with the amnesty law. The end of the rule of law. “The biggest lie of Spanish democracy,” said Feijóo. At each moment, it was done, and disappointment immediately set in. And now he has to forget all that and maintain that Sánchez will not be able to escape unscathed from the accusations against his wife. He is dead. He does not survive these elections. How I tell you.
Deep down, doubts continue. “No one remembers Tito Berni,” Feijóo blurted out at a rally. How can they do this to me who thought that a gang of alleged criminals with less brains than a walnut was directed directly from Moncloa?
There is no doubt that Feijóo makes an effort. On Friday, he referred to “the letters of recommendation that came from Moncloa to obtain contracts from Moncloa.” The letters that Moncloa sent to herself? He had liked the phrase, absurd in its literal sense, very much, because he had pronounced it almost exactly the same two days before. He no longer talks much about the Koldo case, because he fears that the same thing will happen as with the Tito Berni case. Now everything is Begoña, Begoña, Begoña. Begoña, mon amour.
You don’t win elections by being subtle. In an advertisement broadcast on the last day of the campaign, which is well conceived at the beginning, they sneaked in a few bursts of images with Sánchez’s face and, evidently, that of Begoña Gómez, already placed at the same level of evil as her husband. We have a strong argument, but it doesn’t matter. Another dose of Begoña.
In an interview on Onda Cero on May 27, Feijóo said: “I don’t like bringing President Sánchez’s family to a gathering”. Carlos Alsina went to the point: “Yes, he just did it.” And from there it moves on in a few weeks to the video with Gómez’s face, because at this point everyone is already with their pants off.
The PP’s last leap into the void in the campaign was to start talking about a tie. It is true that calibrating expectations before an election day is one of the basic elements of a strategy. Announcing to people that everything is not decided can help them get off their asses and not stay home on Sunday. However, talking about this possibility also meant encouraging the mobilization of the opposing camp. Recognize that the January and March polls that gave an immense advantage to the PP were already history and that the PSOE had a chance of winning or at least staying as close to the PP as in July. If there were voters who were depressed or did not want to go to vote among the socialists – some Europeans, for what –, their drowsiness lifted.
In the PSOE, they began to cheer up and have ended hopes at the top. The first, Sánchez: “An end to the campaign that even having prepared it before could not have turned out better.” The party also has Begoña Gómez in its hearts, as if she alone was going to save Europe from the extreme right. Even the circumspect Salvador Illa joined the celebrations. “A big hug for Begoña from all the Catalan socialists,” he said at the L’Hospitalet rally. With Sánchez in front, of course.
Feijóo’s head began to spin. In another confusing interview on June 3, he stated that a tie or a slight difference between the PP and the PSOE would not mean that the Spaniards accept the amnesty, “because the amnesty law is not subject to consideration.” Seconds later, he said the opposite. “I ask all Spaniards who do not want the amnesty law to vote for the Popular Party.” In that case, if the PP won by a big difference, then it would mean that the Spanish are against that law.
The PP prepared this campaign as if it were a plebiscite around the figure of Sánchez. Realizing that they were not guaranteed a clear victory, they began to collect cable. Isabel Díaz Ayuso began to frown, and that in Genoa causes an increase in the consumption of anxiolytics. Without ostentatiously pointing out anyone, she demanded not to fall “into the mistakes of the last campaign.” Let’s say she was referring to voters’ trust, which has not been demonstrated in any survey. They all highlighted the high degree of mobilization on the right.
If so, one of those culprits had been herself. “Mr. Sánchez, this is sentenced. It doesn’t matter what campaign he runs,” she said at a rally, all euphoric, three days before the July elections. Then came the head-on collision with reality at 160 km. per hour.
The PP of Madrid is willing to attack with as much force as then. Feijóo puts on a good boy face from time to time and has the courage to regret the high degree of tension in the political confrontation. “The Government’s trap is to divide the Spanish people,” he said on Friday.
Among Ayuso’s puppies, there is no room for those moments of weakness. Alma Ezcurra, deputy of the Madrid Assembly, let out all her anger at the last rally in Madrid and called the socialists “dogs” and lamented that the independentists are still “alive and well.” We already know why Ayuso put her as number 3 on the European list.
Ezcurra is not one of those who is thinking of settling for a draw. PP leaders with a lesser homicidal instinct set the bar by which Feijóo will be examined. “We have to win by more than 3.5 points”, one of them told El Mundo. That margin of a minimum victory of three or four points is where the aspirations of these barons move.
It is right there where the (political) life expectancy of the PP leader must be placed. Below there, there is only pain.
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