“I know little about this matter, but I suppose my cousin will know. And one day he told me: I have brought here ten of the most important scientists in the world and no one has guaranteed me the weather that will be tomorrow in Seville. How can anyone say what is going to happen in the world in 300 years?”
It was the year 2007 and Mariano Rajoy, author of the quote, who was only president of the PP, did not believe in climate change because a relative of his, professor of Physics at the University of Seville, had promised him that it was not even possible to predict the weather that it was going to be the next day and that, therefore, environmental issues should not become “the big world problem”.
Eight years later, at the COP21 summit in Paris and already as Prime Minister, in the heat of an electoral campaign, he announced a Climate Change Law similar to the one that had existed in the United Kingdom since 2008 or in the US since 2009. In 2015 Mariano Rajoy had already changed his mind and spoke of climate change like this: “It is the biggest environmental challenge we are facing”
Anecdotes aside, many years ago climate change consolidated itself as one of the main citizen concerns on a global scale, even ahead of terrorism from groups such as the Islamic State (ISIS) or computer attacks, according to the results of a 2019 report. from the Pew Research Center. Today, even some formations of the European extreme right, moved by growing social concern, have turned their traditional denialist discourse towards more strategic positions in defense of the environment.
And that is why it is not trivial that the PSOE has made the climate emergency one of the axes of this long electoral campaign of 28M. The Government of Juanma Moreno has put it on a plate, after the Andalusian PP, dragged by Vox, has approved a bill to legalize the illegal irrigation of Doñana, despite the severe warnings of scientists and the European Commission , which has already warned that it will use all the means at its disposal, including sanctions, to stop the pardon for irregular wells.
The Socialists congratulate themselves on having dragged the PP into a framework such as that of the climate emergency, which they believe to be a loser for the right due to “the sensitivity that it arouses among the voters” and on which those of Feijóo “have made an erroneous calculation moved by the social behaviors of 20 years ago”.
“Putting the interest of farmers in the area first can give them votes in a handful of municipalities in Huelva, but lose them in the rest of the national territory,” say the strategists of the socialist campaign. Hence, they have no intention of releasing the prey to the cry of “Doñana no se toca”. Not even after Moreno Bonilla in his last public statements has left the door open to modify the Doñana law, after assuring that the legislative project “is susceptible to modifications and changes.”
The PSOE understands that the scarcity of water is on the street and, furthermore, it transcends the national framework, as shown by the fact that even the Washington Post has echoed the controversial PP plan that Alberto Nuñez Feijóo has repeatedly endorsed.
The housing problem is another issue that the Prime Minister intends to confront with the right, after the agreement with his coalition partners and parliamentarians for the approval of the first state law and the decision to mobilize 50,000 SAREB assets to social rental and the promotion of another 43,000 new buildings.
Beyond the small print and the doubts that Sánchez’s announcements on this matter may raise, the PSOE understands that housing has an obvious municipal significance and that only putting the issue at the center of the debate “can have a mobilizing effect”. in an electorate that in the polls recognizes that “housing is a matter that the left manages better than the right”.
The approval of the 1998 land law, the liberalization of prices, the stoppage of the construction of social housing during the PP governments and the privatization of public developments are part of a history that generates discomfort in a Feijóo, who in Much more is at stake in these elections than being the first force on the political board or not.
This is the optimistic drawing that the PSOE makes five weeks after the municipal and regional elections, where they do not rule out that Sánchez will pull the BOE again to announce new social measures before May 28. Neither the open schism within the coalition as a consequence of the reform of the law of only yes is yes, nor the divergences between Sumar and Podemos are matters in which the Socialists are going to stop for a single second during the next month. The first thing is matter, in his opinion, “already amortized” after the approval this week in Congress of the modifications to the text that has allowed the reduction in the sentence of more than a thousand sexual abusers and the release of another hundred . “As much as Podemos wants to pedal with the issue in the campaign, the citizens have understood that there was a problem, that the President of the Government has done what he had to do to solve it and that he has also put what before with whom”, they sentence from La Moncloa in allusion to the votes of the PP that have made it possible for the reform to go ahead.
And with regard to the entropy that the left gives off to the left of the PSOE, the government party’s strategy for these municipal and autonomous communities involves not interfering in the debate of others, except to appeal to the need for that space to be recomposed. after 28-M. The contrary would put at risk the reissue of a progressive government.
The Socialists prefer to ignore the differences that separate Yolanda Díaz from Pablo Iglesias, convinced that they will finally be understood for the general elections. A different matter is that there is no discomfort, there is, with the second vice president because of what she said, in an interview with Jordi Évole, about Spain’s relationship with Morocco, about the political responsibility that Fernando Grande Marlaska should have assumed for the crisis in Melilla and for the machismo that he attributed to the President of the Government. And so they have sent it to him, although Moncloa prefers not to reveal whether or not it was the president himself who made the statements ugly.
There is not a single minister who believes that Díaz was right in that interview a week ago. “She, who always appears in immaculate white and a Profident smile, decided to go down into the mud to discuss small things that have nothing to do with citizen problems,” says a socialist, surprised by the record that the vice president showed.
If, as experts in political communication maintain, every good campaign involves including the concerns of a broad social majority on the agenda, moving hearts and shaking consciences, Díaz did not succeed that night. And that is the path that, on the contrary, the PSOE maintains that it is preparing to travel to mobilize the electorate. At the moment, he is trying with housing and the climate emergency.
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