When María Guardiola from Extremadura assumed the leading role in the function of coherence and principles against Vox, there were those who rushed to draw Alberto Núñez Feijóo as the only safe option for change through a government alone without representation of the far right. “The leader of the right is advancing in his strategy of breaking with the politics of blocs”, came to proclaim the media trumpeting that replicates the arguments of Calle Génova. A few weeks later, Guardiola ate her words and announced a government in coalition with those who “deny violence against women, dehumanize immigrants and throw the LGTBI flag into a bin.” And all, after a conversation between Feijóo and Abascal, to unblock the formation of autonomous governments.
The scene, which transcends Extremaduran politics, put black on white the dependence of the PP on those of Abascal in a Spain that long ago replaced imperfect bipartisanship with blocism, much more imperfect and much more dangerous in a Spain where the extreme right is within the institutions and its normalization is already a reality in a good part of Europe.
The PSOE is as dependent on the left on its left as is the PP on an extreme right that has managed to get a part of the citizenry to confuse its ideology with that of Feijóo’s party. And what is worse: that the PP has succumbed to its ideology and normalized that a party that stigmatizes minorities, is in favor of cutting rights to immigrants and is willing to cut social rights is its natural partner. And this, above all, is what the PP candidate is trying to shake off in this electoral campaign with the call for a useful vote and the constant appeals to a lone government that seems impossible to the extent that Vox will assert its seats after 23J if they are necessary for Feijóo to reach Moncloa.
While the PSOE campaign goes through making the PP-Vox agreements visible in communities and town halls, those of Feijóo present themselves to public opinion as a transversal party, which flees from extremism and which will guarantee a calm change, as if there could be serenity with a coalition in which those who are nostalgic for Francoism and for any past time being better are becoming more explicit in their intentions every day.
Pedro Sánchez, for his part, tries to avoid any matter that reminds him of Podemos and to value the importance of the fact that Sumar has been able to unite 15 parties to the left of the PSOE and that the forms of Yolanda Díaz do not even resemble to those of Irene Montero or Ione Belarra, and much less to those of Pablo Iglesias. That the second vice president tries in her campaign to accentuate her own profile in front of her colleagues in the Council of Ministers, sometimes charges against the PSOE or attributes the paternity of social measures that do not belong exclusively to her, is not something that worries the barracks either. General of the Socialists. In the end and in the end, both electorates are communicating vessels and the left as a whole aspires for Sumar’s coalition to wrest the status of third force from the extreme right, which would benefit them in the distribution of seats in some constituencies. Deep down, like the PP with respect to Vox, they know that there are more issues that bring them closer than those that differentiate them. And, above all, that what is at stake on this occasion is not only whether or not there is alternation, but whether or not Spain regresses in rights already won or is dyed sepia.
The popular ones are trapped in the spider web woven by the extreme right, but the socialists cannot avoid that their dependence on ERC or Bildu has been installed in the debate, who have been their usual parliamentary allies in the term that ends and that is where it is where the PP intends to also drag them into this campaign, knowing that the agreements with Catalan and Basque separatists have weighed down a good part of the management of their government.
In a campaign, that of 23J, which is waged in the field of emotions and television sets with a dynamic in which the like is imposed on the management or the programs, portraying the adversary together with their potential partners has become priority objective of the two main parties. At the end of the day, it is in the electoral context where it is most intensely evident that politics and conventional campaigns have long since been devoured by a new way of communicating. Emotions rule more than reason, so the neglect of citizen perception and their states of mind, no matter how distorting they may be in politics, has been one of the issues that has most harmed Sánchez and brought Feijóo closer, before to even start the campaign, a few meters from La Moncloa.
drive for change
This is demonstrated by the demoscopic data in which what is known in sociology as the drive for change is in the majority and “the perception of an anticipated winner” is on the side of the PP candidate. This is explained by José Pablo Ferrándiz, director of Public Opinion at Ipsos Spain, whose works already perceive that the right-wing electorate is installed in “illusion, change and mobilization” while those on the left navigate the stormy world of “lack of interest and discouragement”: and he adds that the issues that have worn the government the most are, according to the polls, Catalonia, the tense relationship between coalition partners, identity issues and the law of ‘only yes is yes’ .
Ferrándiz also believes that the three necessary conditions are met for the right to be the first force: that there are no more than two parties competing in the same bloc, the demobilization of the left and the transfer of votes from the PP to the PSOE. Far from the latter having slowed down, demoscopy experts believe that even at this moment in which Feijóo has become entangled with the pacts with Vox, the percentage of decantation from one party to another is the highest in recent months. Until the last and controversial CIS survey this week, it registered 9.1% of socialist voters who would be thinking of voting for the popular, which could mean up to 600,000 voters, according to Ipsos calculations.
The so-called “decided undecided” -those who have decided to vote but have not yet decided who- on this occasion are half of those registered in the first days of the campaign prior to the 2019 elections. Vox vote for the PP. 20% of the voters of the extreme right have already decided to vote for Feijóo and the poll does not perceive that there will be much more because the ground of the Abascal brand is quite solid.
The one that is not yet so clear is the third position on the board for which Vox and Sumar are competing, both moving in a percentage point above or below 13% of the votes. And in this variable, Ferrándiz detects a greater mobilization among the so-called alternative left than there is in the center and center-left electorate of the PSOE, which could favor Yolanda Díaz.
And this in an electorate, even on the right, in which Feijóo arouses zero enthusiasm as a political leader and is only considered “the means to an end”, which is what is known on the right and the extreme right. for “repealing sanchismo”.
