Five years after the miracle – in the form of an electoral carom – that brought Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla to the presidency of the Junta de Andalucía, endorsed three and a half years later with an absolute majority and the conquest of almost all institutional power – the town councils of provincial capitals and six of the eight councils in the South of Spain – it seems indisputable (except for those who still want to pretend to be blind) that the conservative cycle in the largest Spanish autonomy is not going to be short. It gives the impression that it can be prolonged indefinitely with the aspiration of reaching almost forty years of hegemony of the PSOE.
There will be those who think that this is a majestic and exaggerated statement, but – as Machado (Antonio) said – the path is made, above all, by walking. And, in the case of the southern left, so nostalgic for past times that are increasingly remote, and unable in the last five years to even scratch the president of the Board, it is also falling apart on foot. Since December 2018, which was when the sudden constellation of planets that annihilated Susana Díaz's Rocío Peronism occurred, all the opposition's serious attempts to erode San Telmo (Quirinale) have been in vain.
The latest attempt, which amounts to something like trying to inflate (Cervantine-style) a dog, has been a manifesto signed collectively by the Comisiones Obreras union, which helped – discreetly – the Sumar experiment in Andalusia, whose electoral results They were not exactly enviable. It has been joined by left-wing political parties – the secular consortium of opposing minorities –, some (mute) remains of Andalusianism that have not (yet) been swallowed up by Moreno Bonilla, and a basically desperate PSOE.
The latter is a politically important fact: the socialists, who have always discounted, not without a certain arrogance, that all the deputies located to their left belonged to them symbolically, since in the end they ended up supporting them in any circumstance to block the way for the right, certify by joining this communal initiative that alone are not capable of articulating an alternative social majority to the PP.
Adelante Andalucía, the minority led by Teresa Rodríguez, former Podemos, and also the UGT union, of socialist obedience and tried these days in the Sevillian courts, have distanced themselves from this new experiment, which aims to mobilize progressive social bases. due to a scandal related to massive fraud allegedly committed with regional subsidies. The initiative, in any case, does not seem to have much scope beyond the purely testimonial aspect.
The reasons are environmental. It arises immediately after the breakup (more than stormy) between Sumar and Podemos, the debacle of the left in the Galician elections and a state political scenario conditioned by the agreements between Moncloa and the independence parties, now affected by the Basque elections and the electoral advance in Catalonia. The political resurrection of a left-wing social majority in Andalusia is a generational desire rather than a feasible hypothesis, as evidenced by the results of all the elections that have been held in the South of Spain for half a decade now.
There are ways to politically erode Moreno Bonilla – the essential one is his disastrous health management, although there are also notable cracks on the economic front – but the problem is that the left-wing parties are incapable of making them profitable due to their little social credibility, no imagination and impossible capacity. of internal renewal. The decline of the president of the Board, who works every day to consolidate his hegemony following the roadmap of the old PSOE, including party control of regional institutions, will begin – if it ever begins – with the blurring of propaganda official of San Telmo (which is constant) rather than because of the real capacity of the opposition to make a dent.
An example is the economic forecasts made public these days by the Caixabank research service, which predict a loss of dynamism in the Andalusian economy, whose growth will be two tenths below that forecast for the rest of the country. The mere formulation of a stagnation, which is the situation in which the South of Spain has been immersed for a long time, is a lie to the arguments of San Telmo, who have manufactured the candid message that Andalusia competes on terms of equality with Catalonia and Madrid.
Caixabank states that the southern GDP remained half a point below the Spanish average in 2023 – 2% compared to 2.5 – and far from the figures for Catalonia and the capital of Spain. Tourism still works, despite the excesses perceptible in the historic centers of the cities, but exports – which have historically been the basis of regional statistics – have deteriorated by more than 10%. The (adverse) effects of the drought on agriculture and the agri-food industry have not helped either.
Caixabank's forecast is that Andalusia will once again grow less than the Spanish economy. Unemployment does not drop below 17.6%, six points higher than the rest of the country. Moreno Bonilla is going to continue indefinitely with his triumphalist speech, although it is based on his desires rather than data. His problem will come the day – which still seems remote – when voters discover that behind his Andalusianism there is only institutional advertising. The Andalusian left, just as in the work of Samuel Beckett, continues to wait for Godot.
