On 28-M, the so-called Botànic project, the pact of all the Valencian left-wings, which since 2015 has allowed the establishment of a political management guide for the Generalitat Valenciana, was finalized. The result, with a landslide victory for the PP, has forced multiple interpretations, with not a few coincidences from various analysts. But after almost a week, this newspaper has consulted with various specialists, observers and politicians to offer a cold reading of the causes of a change of cycle that forces the left to start a journey through the desert of indefinite duration and that gives the right of the PP and Vox almost all the institutional power in the Valencian Community.
All the specialists consulted agree that the national framework has intervened directly in the Valencian result, without detracting from the work carried out by the PP and its leader Carlos Mazón. But the will of Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Pedro Sánchez to transform regional and local elections into plebiscites has ended up benefiting the PP to the detriment, sometimes surprisingly, of the left; as well in the Valencian Community as in other Spanish geographies where the popular ones have even reached absolute hegemony.
The journalist Jesús Civera, one of the best observers of the Valencian political reality, says that "getting rid of the relationship with Madrid, and what Madrid represents, which was one of the beams of the Botànic, has not been possible, as demonstrated on Sunday. We are as we were, more or less, on board the great political currents of Spain". And he adds that unlike the Basque Country or Catalonia, "in the Valencian Community we move in the imaginary that Madrid designs".
Joan Romero, Emeritus Professor of Human Geography, goes further and stresses that the President of the Government has made, in his opinion, "a serious mistake in accepting the conservative party's strategy of presenting the campaign as a first round and as a plebiscite on its continuity". "An error that has been a great injustice with the government's management of the Botànic and with dozens of mayors by focusing citizen attention on the degree of support or rejection of President Sánchez," he adds.
Manuel Alcaraz, former Minister of Transparency and professor of Constitutional Law at the UA broadens his gaze and argues that "the European wave -and partly Latin American- has reached the Valencian beach, showing the progress of the right in the face of the relative incapacity of the left to articulate a program and a story that prefigures a new stage of globalization that is not under the neoliberal mentality".
He adds that the transfer of votes from Ciudadanos to the right is of such intensity that it alters any known rationale for progress and increase: "It is hardly without effort that the right have won seats and council seats that do not depend on work previously done." "When we talk about these elections as a 'first round' or a 'plebiscite', it is interesting to do so from this double perspective, without letting ourselves be carried away by the triviality of the daily disputes of state politics," he adds.
It is unfair, as Daniel Sirera, leader of the Catalan PP and former campaign manager of Carlos Mazón, as well as a good connoisseur of Valencian political reality, points out, limiting everything to the national framework. He points out that despite the good image of Ximo Puig, "his government of him shut himself up in the offices and in the social spheres in which they felt comfortable." "They lost the pulse of the street and belittled a Carlos Mazón who, beyond his public agenda, developed an intense and discreet social activity that has allowed him to establish complicity with all kinds of sectors, even with those that traditionally were not close to the PP". He concludes that Mazón "has known how to connect with the street, while the institutionalization of the Botànic has made it lose freshness and closeness."
Jesús Civera also comments on the internal coexistence of the Botanic. The journalist assesses that "the constant position of Ximo Puig gesturing the idea of moderation as an engine of a serene and evolutionary change has been broken on numerous occasions by his tripartite partners". "So that the partners have radicalized the PSPV in the Generalitat, just as in the city hall of Valencia the PSPV moderated Compromís".
He adds that Ximo Puig has had to exhaust himself in efforts to place the Consell at the center with continuous deviations from its partners, "which has generated confusion. There were times when there was not one but two Botànics, two different souls. Even so, and based on that drive, sometimes explosive, consensus budgets have been approved every year". And he offers one more note: "The disappearance of Mónica Oltra from the political scene was like a premonition of the end of the stage."
Joan Romero summarizes the keys to this defeat of the Botànic, noting that "there is no single reason to explain the result of an election in a mature democracy. But in the Valencian case there are three reasons that, in my opinion, help to understand the result: the collapse of Podemos, the significant loss of citizen support for Compromís and the fact that they were proposed as a first round of a general election".
To go on to report that the collapse of Podemos "in addition to evidencing a certain rejection of some of its national leaders and some of its initiatives promoted by the central government, shows the difficulty of building from the left of social democracy consistent alternatives with a vocation for government in all of Western Europe and even beyond. The professor continues with his argument: "There is a lot of fuel in the form of widespread malaise, and even resentment and anger against the system, within our fractured, insecure and unequal societies."
But he adds that up to now "it has materialized in ephemeral social movements and does not translate into lasting support for political options born to the left of social democracy. Secondly, the loss of support for Compromís refers to the old, but not old, discussion about our history, our social structure, the role of the elites and the difficult construction of a project identity in a complex country".
Manolo Alcaraz, from a theoretical vision, offers other perspectives. "In any case, management began to become trivialized and from the narrative of what had been done or what was to be done, it went on to particular achievements: the political discourse became a technical discourse. Many citizens, thus, could be in a position to appreciate those achievements and , at the same time, to find an alternative story - identity, ideological - that led him to vote for the right to improve the government of the Spanish. Towards the middle of the campaign that was appreciable, but no party turned towards the political".
The reasons given are hypotheses that the facts seem to have demonstrated. The construction of a project of the Valencian left, known as the "Valencian formula", was an undoubted success that resulted in the conquest of the Valencian institutions eight years ago. It seems reasonable to point out that factors pointed out by specialists have ended up eroding a project that was a model in Spain and that has ended up being a victim of external but also internal factors. Will it be possible to rebuild a similar project in the future? It is a question that, for the moment, has a difficult answer until a more rigorous intellectual analysis of what happened on March 28 is not addressed over time.
