At the time when the vote count gave 58 seats to Moreno Bonilla, an absolute majority in Andalusia that he did not expect, the critical mass of commentators and commentators began to point to Pedro Sánchez, who would follow the election night from Moncloa. Someone took the lame duck theory out of the manual, an Anglo-Saxon expression that is applied to North American presidents at the end of their second term when they become irrelevant despite exercising presidential functions and residing in the White House. They already live in the past even though they are in the present.
We must be cautious before writing the political obituary of Pedro Sánchez. But seeing the map of Andalusia dyed blue, without a single province painted red, must impress the president who has made resilience his usual way of dealing with problems in his public life.
Pedro Sánchez's role on the international stage has risen to the occasion. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said he was the leader she respected the most, along with the Danish prime minister. All three are Social Democrats.
In a week it will host the NATO summit, which will be held in Madrid with two very relevant issues on the agenda: the war in Ukraine and the request for Sweden and Finland to join the Atlantic Alliance. Foreign policy is usually the refuge of many leaders caught up in the tensions inherent to the governability of their country. Emmanuel Macron has spoken over a hundred hours on the phone with Putin since last December. A few days ago he said that the Kremlin autocrat who has destroyed entire cities in Ukraine could not be humiliated and in the last week of the campaign he moved to Romania and traveled on the Orient Express from Poland to Kyiv together with Scholz and Draghi to meet the brave and desperate Zelensky.
It was of no use to Macron to obtain a majority in the National Assembly, in which he will have to maneuver between the blocks of Mélenchon's left-wing amalgamation and a Marine Le Pen who has broken into the Chamber with 88 far-right deputies. A failure of the new policy of Macron, whom the French have twice voted for president but on Sunday they gave him a solemn slap in the legislative elections.
Pedro Sánchez could pass with a note in foreign policy. But in politics he does not live on foreign prestige. Neither of blows of effect or the occurrences of the communication experts that surround him. When someone is neglected, someone gets off the hook with moralizing rhetoric or with campaigns on the networks that confuse locals and strangers.
The coalition government has a serious problem in the coalition itself. On fundamental issues such as security, the war in Ukraine, relations with NATO and the European Union and the role of the monarchy they have discrepancies that several ministers of United We Can are responsible for disclosing to the four winds.
Divisions in governments are usually punished at the polls. That effusive embrace between Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias upon sealing the coalition government heralded a clash of two very different political cultures, that of the center-left and that of the radical left.
But the PSOE had 120 seats and needed for the investiture the 35 offered by Pablo Iglesias, plus the rest of the nationalist, independentist and concerted parties, which not only invested it but also approved the budgets.
And from that moment the problems began because Pedro Sánchez's speech and political action are conditioned by the heterogeneity of his partners. In this sense, he becomes more and more like a lame duck because his ability to maneuver is more fragile. Podemos will go its own way and the independentists will not accept any other way out than the rhetoric of independence. Logical.
What would the resilient manual say in such a critical situation? I imagine that it would happen by dismissing the Podemos ministers and limiting relations with the independentistas to the ordinary administration of public affairs. And govern as a minority until elections are called. Who would put a motion of censure on him? He could recover the space of the centrality although perhaps it is too late. In Andalusia it has been occupied by the PP.
