There is no justice in history. The phrase of the philosopher Yuval Noah Harari should be kept in mind by all politicians before feeling mistreated or misunderstood by voters. In fact, after the outcome of 28-M and the call for elections for July 23, the past and the future have merged into the present and the lessons of the local and regional elections in May should serve to lucidly focus the 23-J elections. The main one of these lessons is that management has a relative value: 28-M toppled highly valued governments and, instead, rewarded some with a highly criticized performance.
Some figures are as eloquent as they are paradoxical: one of the best rated regional governments was that of Aragon, and its president, the socialist Javier Lambán, managed to obtain the approval of 59% of his fellow citizens last December (the data is from the CIS). . In addition, the positive evaluation of him among PP voters was the highest of all the socialist presidents: up to 41% of popular voters evaluated Lambán positively.
However, Aragón has turned out to be one of the communities where the relay has been imposed against all odds: PP and Vox added a clear absolute majority on 28-M (35 seats out of 67). The data is relevant because that territory tends to behave electorally like a small Spain. But what is striking is that two other socialist communities with similar indicators of assessment of their respective governments and presidents –Canarias and Castilla-La Mancha– yielded contrasting outcomes: a coalition between insularistas and populares will govern in the islands, while in the Castilian- The socialist García Page from La Mancha retained the absolute majority.
It is true that the leader from La Mancha has been very critical of Pedro Sánchez (and that allowed him to garner a lot of centrist suffrage), but so has Lambán from Aragon, who, however, fell back in votes and seats. At the other extreme, the community of Madrid appeared last December among the worst valued, the same as its president. Díaz Ayuso's assessment improved in April -after closing the conflict with the toilets-, although his performance continued to be tainted by the disastrous management of nursing homes during the pandemic or by the commission that his brother charged for the purchase of masks.
However, and despite supporting his message with some delusional statements, Díaz Ayuso won an absolute majority. And this despite the fact that the Madrid president was the president whose management aroused the greatest rejection among opposition voters. Of course, among his own he aroused the greatest support of all the regional presidents: up to 93% of the popular voters approved of her execution. And that is a key piece of information that guarantees the mobilization of the respective voters (especially if nothing alters it during the campaign).
Now, the absolute majority of Ayuso is based today on fewer votes than in 2021. What's more: the Madrid right has lost almost 200,000 ballots in relation to the elections two years ago. But one of the keys to the success of the regional president was the collapse of Podemos, which on March 28 lost more than 100,000 votes.
From then on, the electoral luck of other much better valued governments, such as that of the Valencian Community, Aragon or the Canary Islands, is explained above all by the decline of the main partner of the PSOE and/or the resounding shipwreck of Podemos. As if the voters of the divided alternative left did not identify with those governments.
Naturally, the defeats of the left are also explained by the mobilization and concentration of the vote of the right around the PP –through locally higher than average participation rates– and, of course, by the downward stagnation of the PSOE in some places. Conclusion: management by itself is not enough if it is not wrapped in a discourse that values it and is in tune with the majority of voters (and especially with their own).
Post-election polls are detecting that there was a lot of cross-voting movement during the past campaign. In other words, it was enough for the PP to focus on the uncomfortable partners of the Government through the noisy controversy over the Bildu lists (or on some statistically insignificant irregularities in voting by mail and that did not affect only the PSOE) for the Executive's management balance sheet was totally obfuscated. And something else that perhaps the polls have not calculated in its fair measure: a society in a bad mood due to the cost of living and an Executive prematurely aged by the exhausting challenges of this legislature.
But neither did socialism manage on 28-M to fix the public conversation around the good economic indicators or social advances. His naïve slogans seemed directed at an abstract voter but not at the concrete beneficiary of the various government policies. The second leg is played on 23-J.
