In the field of Spanish political culture, a concept that for many has something of an unavoidable oxymoron, there is a common place that liberalism, whose genesis is also disputed in the Anglo-Saxon tradition –especially from the philosophical work of Locke–, and even the French one, as a legacy of the 1789 revolution, is an unequivocal Iberian invention.
If this theory is true, there is no doubt that it is a laborious and ephemeral glory: the hardworking liberals gathered in the island that is Cádiz in 1812, authors of a Constitution of relative vitality and somewhat condescending with the privileges of the clerical power of the Old Regime, there were never too many. Neither in number nor in influence.
In the southern parts of Andalusia, the revolution of 1831 ended in blood on the beach of San Andrés in Málaga. Its historical martyrs embodied for the poet Espronceda and the painter Gisbert, who immortalized them at the moment of their tragic trance, a romantic ideal that would take three decades to bear fruit. His ideas never ceased to be exotic strange flowers.
Time has not altered this generally fateful fortune of Southern liberals. During the almost forty years of autonomy there has never been a centrist political alternative. All attempts failed. The electoral collapse of Cs last 19J, a fake replica of the old dream of the enlightened liberals, has not changed this fate either.
The trajectory of the orange ambassadors in Andalusia, mostly from other political brands, and in general chusqueros of politics who came close to the good wind raised from Catalonia, where the embryo of the organization was founded, fluctuated, just as in its day it happened with the Andalusians, between the supporting role of the PSOE (in its last stage in power) or as a hinge on the door of change (without change) embodied by the PP. It was a matter of time before they ended up dying. The whims, in politics, are paid.
If its decline has not been much earlier, it is simply due to the institutional factor: during the three and a half years in which Cs governed with the PP, the party of Inés Arrimadas was able to hide the statistical truth: both its bases and its leaders and representatives abandoned in mass the liberal ship. The orange party leadership also resisted a coalition with the PP before Moreno Bonilla achieved his absolute majority. An absolute and categorical error: it would have been less bad for them in a joint list than alone.
The first measures of the new legislature in Andalusia are confirming the absorption and extinction of Cs. The last devoted oranges are desperately trying to convince their dwindling bases of the need for a Liberal Refoundation, which is the last trump card of the current leadership. Meanwhile, his former councilors on the Board, his deputies and many of his senior officials are accepting the political positions offered by the PP on the Board.
This same week Juan Marín, his last leader, agreed to an offer from the Andalusian president to relocate him (with a generous public salary) as a government representative in the Economic and Social Council of Andalusia, an advisory body in the orbit of the Quirinale. Needless to say, Marín, who maintained that he would abandon public life if his candidacy did not achieve parliamentary representation, and to whom the Cs leadership had proposed running for mayor of Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Cádiz), his town of origin, they have not elected in San Telmo neither for his legal knowledge nor for his social representativeness.
His is a reward for loyalty, even if it is in favor of the PP instead of for the benefit of Cs, whose real situation in Andalusia is terminal. Beyond the changes of shore and the conversions of liberal assumptions that in twenty-four hours have become conservative, the absorption of Cs by the PP, a spectacle of human inconsistencies, transcends the personal.
Moreno Bonilla is rehearsing with this movement his particular political 'summa' with a view to the municipal elections of 28M, in which the socialists will fight to keep their last shield of institutional defense in the South –the councils and the town councils– and the PP will openly poses as a second round (victorious) of the autonomic.
The two big games are played a lot in these elections. For the PSOE, a debacle could imply the territorial dismantling of the organization, a calamity whose outcome would accelerate its definitive decline. For Moreno Bonilla, on the other hand, 28M has only one meaning: the ratification of absolute power. A definitive hegemony and, at the same time, the solid foundations of an era of conservative power in the South of Spain –the great springboard to reach Moncloa– lasting. longevity Almost eternal.
While the socialists try not to fall into discouragement by recalling a past as distant as it is nostalgic – the 40th anniversary of Felipe González's historic victory in 1982 – at the Quirinale they caress a far from hypothetical future without rivals or competition. Omnimode. To achieve this, they need to add the voters of Cs and other political forces –this is the case of the fragmented minorities of Andalusianism– to their new cause, which has advanced locally, as the data from 19J show, but in certain cities and localities of inland Andalusia are not resounding. Pockets of resistance still exist.
Moreno Bonilla seeks, in this way, to resurrect the philosophy of Andalucía Suma – the joint electoral platform with Cs that was not consummated for the regional ones – in order to transfer it de facto, and always after the elections, to the town halls and the councils, whose governability may depend in certain local squares on external political support that remains outside the great mainstream electoral trends.
The Quirinale wants to add from its extremes. And it has a good chance of achieving it, taking into account that within the sociological arch of the right, the PP is the dominant political brand. San Telmo's offer is formulated, following the rhetoric of the Vatican, with a clear ecumenical claim. All are invited to sit at the right hand of the father.
There are neither red lines nor cordons sanitaires. The PP equally formulates this (diffuse) integration offer for 28-M to the municipal representatives of Vox and to the disillusioned socialists; and includes the last orthodox of Andalusianism and the residual liberals.
Opposite you have the socialists (in a critical situation) and a constellation of left-wing minorities – Adelante, Podemos, Izquierda Unida – who do not speak to each other, who will undoubtedly attend on separate lists and who do not have the support (delegate) of Yolanda Díaz , who after the disaster of their representatives on 19J knows that Andalusia has become a hostile land.
