Journey to the past. May 2007. The PP celebrates the result of the municipal and regional elections. Rajoy is already seen at Moncloa. The fruit is ripe. Zapatero, the election thief with the lockpick of Islamic terrorism, is already defeated. In the Community of Madrid, the popular have taken 20 points to the PSOE. It's done. One only has to wait until March 2008, the date of the general elections, to evict the squatter from Moncloa.
The date arrives and the milkmaid of the PP ends as in the story: with an empty pitcher. The popular did their homework. They got the ten million votes that should be enough to win the elections. But Rodríguez Zapatero drew more than eleven! In Catalonia, the PSC obtained more deputies than all the other parties combined. The campaign ran in the same terms as the one that is now beginning: the right advocated the repeal of shoemaking and the PSOE called to stop the feet of the “fachas”.
Sánchez's hope is to clone that comeback of the former president and now a successful lobbyist in prestige and compensation, Rodríguez Zapatero. The lesson: what has happened can happen. Although there are differences and a statistical fact that add difficulty to the Sanchista challenge. The differences: Spain was a bipartisan country then, the beating in terms of loss of power for the Socialists was not so humiliating and ten months passed between one election and another. The statistics: of the five times that the municipal ones have preceded the general ones, that is the only exception to the rule that whoever wins in towns and cities also wins the Cortes.
Sánchez, as in 2008 Rodríguez Zapatero, has raised the banner of "They will not pass". But we already know that he can't reach him alone. Neither to Feijóo, in his attempt to repeal sanchismo. Spain is no longer bipartisan, although some of the new actors –Ciudadanos– have lived fast to leave a pretty corpse.
Both need the outraged on the left or the pissed off on the right. The narrative of the combat between two is a fiction. As in good scripts, supporting actors make the difference. And on Sunday, the electoral market said that the angry ones on the right are more – or at least they are more active – than the angry ones on the left. Although we want to hide it, out of laziness or out of habit, the truth is that the future of Spain is in the hands of the angry ones of one color or another.
Yesterday, Núñez Feijoo, during his visit to the Cercle d'Economia, pretended that Vox does not exist. Just as the PSOE tries to attract all the attention to itself, as if its left had ceased to exist. As an electoral strategy it is correct. But the master key, yes or yes, will be in the hands of a grumpy night watchman. We will see in July. But as of today, that man wears an Abascal uniform.
And in Catalonia? Someone must have whispered to Pere Aragonès that if Sánchez had called elections, he, following in his wake, had to add something as president of the Generalitat after the municipalist debacle of his party. He fulfilled the order. Only that having to say something is not the same as having something to say.
So Aragonès took the scarecrow of the independence unit out of the closet with a scruffy and incomprehensible speech. He looked like a listless lifeguard doing mouth-to-mouth to a dead man. At the minute the smacks rained down on him –from JxCat, CUP, communes and even from his own party–, but he did manage to start the dramatization of the impossible rearmament of independence.
ERC, and also in JxCat Jordi Turull and company, should take note that Xavier Trias has won the elections in Barcelona hiding the estelada. And that the best resistance of JxCat in many mayoralties has been thanks to the fact that its candidates have spent the campaign boasting of being classic convergents, not sticking out their chests like borrasistas or puigdemontistas. That ERC and JxCat now begin the already familiar dance of impossible unity, instead of delving into their respective long-term projects, is an invitation for Catalonia to vote en masse for the PSC in July. Sánchez already has in Catalonia what he is looking for in all of Spain. And with the help, we suppose involuntary, of Aragonès and Turull. Both determined to ventilate the lungs of a corpse.
