The six and a half million citizens summoned to the polls will elect something more than the Andalusian Parliament on 19-J. They will also decide whether the Government of Pedro Sánchez, which seems to have emerged alive from the crisis of the Pegasus case but continues without recovering the stability of the beginning of the year, deserves a disapproval or a vote of confidence. The Andalusian race, three weeks before the start of the campaign, begins to take on the appearance of a state plebiscite, although the dilemma is formulated in a regional key. Andalusia is the priority on the agenda of the party leaders, who know that their immediate future is at stake in the South.
The President of the Government was in Torredelcampo (Jaén) on Saturday, in his first pre-campaign act, to encourage a PSOE whose mobilization is being discreet. He defended his management and warned against "Putin's friends", referring to the extreme right. Inés Arrimadas (Citizens) presented her candidates in Córdoba over the weekend and claimed the liberal option. It is doubtful that it will survive the black omens of the polls. Its militants and leaders are abandoning the orange boat. Macarena Olona (Vox) sailed days ago from Jerez the first controversy of attrition in the great battle of the South – her registration figured in Salobreña – and insisted that her party will not admit not entering San Telmo. Abascal was with her yesterday in Almería – her great Andalusian stronghold – in an act against illegal immigration.
The candidate of the confluence that brings together the left and, individually, militants of Podemos, Inmaculada Nieto (For Andalusia), tries to remedy the image wear caused by internal dissension by evoking Julio Anguita. Feijóo visits Seville tomorrow with the intention of cutting the leaks of the conservative vote for his right. The essential struggle – between a Moreno Bonilla who replaces the PP acronym with his personal brand and Vox – draws the starting strategies of the right. The president of the Board has been with messages for some time that suggest that the Andalusians are the first round of generals not called. He thus tries to prevent the pre-campaign from focusing on whether he will agree with the ultramontane, an option that he continues on the table in San Telmo. He has never stopped being.
Olona replies with the message of his party: without Vox there will be no real change in the South, but the mere replacement of the PSOE by a PP with a panic to apply policies that reverse the socialist ideological heritage. The PP has decided to dilute its brand to seek the borrowed votes of left-wing voters who, given the real possibility that Vox grows, may choose it as a hypothetical emergency containment dam.
Moreno knows that achieving a transfer of foreign votes does not depend on the enthusiasm that his figure arouses, but on the absence of rejection. His institutional profile and the plausibility of a story that presents him to progressive voters as a lesser evil, capable of also convincing voters who are critical of the Prime Minister's pacts with PNV, Bildu and ERC, are his strengths . Vox also explores this space, although with a more apocalyptic tone.
The ascendancy of Moreno Bonilla has grown after the political execution of Pablo Casado, whose ambassadors in Andalusia have left the lists or descend to secondary positions in favor of the regional councilors of the PP, who will lead the candidacies in the eight provinces. The socialists, lacking in self-esteem, oscillate between the demonization of Vox and the insistence on evaluating the management of the PP-Cs Government. Some elections raised with the conceptual framework that the two right-wings are trying to establish – an indirect motion of censure must be made to Moncloa taking advantage of the Andalusian advance – do not benefit them.
Especially if one takes into account that in order to recover their voters, punished by rising prices and economic deterioration, they have entrusted their letters to a network of mayors and presidents of councils that does not end up altering the diagnosis of the polls. A bad result in the South would imply more instability for Moncloa, which was the one who imposed Juan Espadas and controls the largest PSOE federation in Spain. The elections in the South are going to be decided with a vote oriented against. Or of Vox (that is how the left and the PSOE formulate it) or of Pedro Sánchez (thesis that feeds PP and Vox).
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