Watch out for the young. The first week of the year has begun with a message for Pedro Sanchez and his from his former Rasputin, the spin doctor Ivan Redondo In his article on Monday in Godó’s newspaper: “2023 will be twelve months of interstellar dust. The last year of the legislature is usually governed by intense and turbulent currents of air that threaten candidates and parties…”.
Redondo, the same one who gave the starting signal months ago to the Yolanda Díaz’s ‘presidential candidacy’launches a serious warning to Sánchez, the PSOE and his government partners about the two elections of 2023: “When Moncloa is really at stake, the government shield is diluted and every block burns. And, to begin with, with a difference between blocks of nine points in favor of the right (46% vs. 37%), the flare not only reaches and burns you, but also takes on a solar dimension.”
And he continues in his demoscopic analysis: “With some black holes to the left, for example, that almost 40.3% of new voters are willing to vote for one of the two brands on the right. An unprecedented sign. Even more so in a week in which Financial Times has confirmed through a study that the millennials British and Americans no longer turn Tory as they get older. Add to this point that Being 18 doesn’t mean being progressive either.”
The FT, in its article dated December 30, declared that “if you are not a communist at 18, you don’t have a heart, and if you continue to be a communist at 35, you don’t have a head”, which the newspaper attributes “to Winston Churchill. or the american president John Adams. or maybe the king Oscar II of Sweden…”. Being young is no longer synonymous with leftist but neither does getting old mean embracing conservatives.
Young Europeans, on the right
In this change of the electorate abounds a study of the Fondapol Foundation, of Paris, in May of last year, on young Europeans. It highlights that voters on the continent between the ages of 18 and 24 “are on the right, more even than conservative age segments -such as those over 65-“. “Our study reveals that the new generations position themselves to the right,” said the director of the study, Victor Delagea The vanguard.
whatThe same thing happens -or with the same intensity- among young Spaniards? Every time, compared to those who promoted Podemos and 15-M 8 years ago, is there a generation -disparagingly called ‘cayetanos’- who no longer have any complexes in recognizing that they vote for the right? According to the same newspaper, the political scientist and professor of the King Juan Carlos, Javier Lorentestudy author “Youth and the left-right divide in Europe in the last 30 years“, “we now have the youth most identified with the values of the right in the last fifty years“.
The reality of the EU governments corroborates this appreciation: only 6 -including Spain- of the 27 member countries are governed by the left or center-left. According to the director of Fundapol, this “right-wing” inclination of European youth, to which Spanish youth is no stranger, is explained by “the distrust they express regarding the institutions and the political system as a whole: the disappointment derived from the unfulfilled promises of social democracy (security, social justice and progress) leads them to rely only on themselves”.
In the Fondapol survey there are revealing data such as that when asked “what age group is most convinced that the unemployed could find work if they really wanted it?”, those surveyed between 25 and 34 years of age are the group that the largest number answered affirmatively (58%), followed by the 18 to 24 age group (56%).
All the illusion that was put into the 15-M has gone down the drain of a case in Galapagar while the “there is no bread for so much chorizo” has dissolved like sugar in the enthusiastic approval by Podemos and the PSOE of the reduction of the crime of embezzlement
Nor has the left been able to respond to the problems linked to security and immigration. According to the same European study, “56% of the 25 to 34-year-old group believes that there are many immigrants in my country“.
In Spain, the youth is increasingly aware that the State “is incapable of guaranteeing a dignified and stable future“, that they are going to be “the first generation that lives worse than their parents” and that all the illusion that was put into 15-M has gone down the drain of a case in Galapagar while that of “There is no bread for so much chorizo“It has dissolved like a sugar cube in the enthusiastic approval by Podemos and the PSOE of the reduction in the crime of embezzlement.
To this, and as a Spanish peculiarity, we must add that in the countryside and in small municipalities, this fixation of environmentalism and misunderstood animalism has stigmatized thousands and thousands of young people who live hunting, the fields or the bulls in a way that the urban environmentalist left has been unable to understand. For this reason, in the Andalusian elections, the polls came to give Abascal’s party as the favorite among young people between 18 and 24 years of age in municipalities with less than 20,000 inhabitants.
On May 28, the municipal and regional elections will take place: a real plebiscite on Pedro Sánchez -as much as the socialist ‘barons’ who, after swallowing and swallowing, are now asking to be voted for their management and not for the policy of the Moncloa tenant- and about Podemos, who sees how Yolanda Díaz waits with the scythe ready to jump over the purple corpse and launch his candidacy after months of separating from Pablo Iglesias and his women in the Government.
Young people and Ayuso’s 4-M
Will young people go to the right? In Andalusia they already did. In Madrid, too: in the elections in which he swept Isabel Diaz Ayusothe sum of PP, Vox and the remains of Cs won the youth vote with 10 points more than PSOE, Podemos and Más Madrid, according to data from Gad3. Iván Redondo, the FT, the Fondapol Foundation… they all warn him: young people will be decisive in getting Pedro Sánchez and his partners out of Moncloa. Winston Churchill’s aphorism -or whoever said it- will go down in history.
