Sánchez tries to get out of the mud and combine foreign and territorial agenda to gain momentum against the Europeans

“It is not that you have gone down into the mud, it is that you have emerged from it.” The phrase that Pedro Sánchez said to Alberto Núñez Feijóo last Wednesday in Congress during his appearance to explain the results of the last European Council coincides with the feelings of politicians and analysts who have followed the trajectory of the current opposition leader since it happened. Manuel Fraga at the head of the PP of Galicia. Moderation, which is the vitola with which he arrived in Madrid after actively participating in the coven of barons that put an end to Pablo Casado's leadership, has never been, contrary to what his media trumpeter insistently repeats, the main trait of his political action. Quite the opposite.

The same score that he used against the Galician bipartisan party chaired by the socialist Emilio Pérez Touriño is the one that he deploys today against the government of Pedro Sánchez. “It splashes in the mud, it feeds on the mud and it coughs up mud,” summarizes a Galician socialist who does not at all share the analyzes of those who believe that the opposition strategy of the PP leader is due to his dependence on the Ayuso-Aznar tandem and defends , on the contrary, which is a replica of the one he already extended to the Touriño government between 2005 and 2009, his only years of opposition until he emigrated to Madrid. A different issue, the same interlocutor adds, is that “once institutional power was conquered, it abandoned demagoguery and populism and that the vast majority of regional media also ignored its errors and weaknesses, which are many.”

The roadmap he followed in the 2009 campaign prior to his first Galician victory is the same one he follows today in 2024, according to the words of those who lived closely during Feijóo's years as a candidate for the presidency of the Xunta: “Tension, broad brush, manipulation and spreading lies knowing they are lies until the sound and fury become politically and socially unbearable.” Thus pigeonholed in hyperbole and bellicose attitude, the PP is managing, in addition to installing an unbreathable climate, to also shrink Vox's space in Congress, on the street and in the media.

Their destructive opposition is summarized, according to Pedro Sánchez's diagnosis, in two words: “nothing and mud.” As he said this week in Parliament during the course of a debate on foreign policy in which some believed they perceived that the government and opposition lowered the tone of recent weeks, although Feijóo did not miss the opportunity to bring up the pacts with Bildu for a walk. , to Puigdemont and the “corruption in his personal environment”, in clear allusion to the wife of the President of the Government, who in recent days has been the subject of false information that the PP and some of its related media have replicated as if they were truthful. .

Despite the fact that Minister Óscar Puente, the most belligerent against the right and hoaxes, has reduced his declarative intensity this week on X (Twitter) and on radio and television microphones, the socialists deny that there is an explicit slogan in this regard. The head of Transportation in fact corroborates this and says that his case is “a mere question of biorhythm” that does not obey any indication. In La Moncloa, however, there is a certain desire to get out of the quagmire that the public debate has become. And the formula is none other than combining Sánchez's foreign and territorial agenda to gain momentum ahead of the European elections.

Stay in Euskadi and win in Catalonia

The socialists take it for granted that after the Basques, which will be held next Sunday, their brand will maintain the position of the current board and will continue to be part of the coalition government with the PNV, although EH-Bildu will be the party with the most votes, as indicated by the polls. In the Catalan elections, which, without a doubt, will mark a before and after in the legislature and will determine the health of the relationship with the current parliamentary partners, they trust that Salvador Illa will win and that, whatever government results, the result will be also “an endorsement for Pedro Sánchez” and his political call for the reunion between Catalonia and the rest of Spain.

“What the polls dictate in Catalonia [aseguran] “will have nuclear importance for the European elections” next June, which is when the PP trusts that the electorate will severely punish the coalition government and, from there, that the legislature will falter to the point that Sánchez will have to dissolve the Cortes and anticipate elections. Those around the president deny the greatest and have also decided that the government, beyond defending itself, does not enter into a framework with which the right seeks to get citizens to disconnect from politics. The strategy involves displaying the international profile as an agenda that brings Israel's indiscriminate attacks on Gaza to the center of the debate and with tours like the one he is carrying out these days in Europe in search of support for the recognition of a Palestinian State, which he trusts that Spain can consider in this same quarter.

Sánchez has also already met with the top leaders of Arab countries such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, before whom he reminded that his Government is in a position to take the step of recognizing Palestine as long as two conditions are met: that Spain does not be left alone on that path and that it serves for the definitive resolution of the war. Recognition will occur, when both conditions are met, by decision of the Council of Ministers, although the president will go to Congress to explain the decision.

Moncloa believes it is moving in this way “in the right direction”, despite the attempts by the right to caricature the international profile of the president and to intoxicate the debate. That is why he strives to contrast a government “respected on the foreign scene” and with “a country project” with a Feijóo “determined to emulate the practices of the extreme right and who lacks a plan for Catalonia, Spain and the world.” ”.

The socialists therefore reject the old formula of “less Syria and more Soria” that is attributed to the popular Jesús Posada in the 2004 general elections to attract the attention of former president Aznar to internal politics as it is the natural space to prevail in the polls. And today, 20 years after that, they defend that the international agenda determines a good part of the national one and that everything that dominates it, especially the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, has very direct consequences on the lives of the Spanish people.

The president, however, will also redouble the presence of the different Autonomous Communities in defense of their socioeconomic policy and with the purpose of including new issues on the agenda with which to recover the political initiative. And, incidentally, “get out of that mud in which the right always wins,” says a socialist minister. The measures announced this week on housing are just the beginning of a string of the country's major social problems that the Executive plans to bring to public debate to force the right to position itself on each of them and contrast models. “People expect from us something more than the confrontation that the PP wants to drag us into, and that is for us to talk about employment, pensions or housing,” they add from the presidential cabinet.