After the impeccable debate on Wednesday night on public television between Pedro Sánchez, Santiago Abascal and Yolanda Díaz, now come the scenes of fighting in the mud.
For the first time in this campaign, the president and candidate, Pedro Sánchez, pointed out in an interview in La Sexta the “disturbing” – the adjective was put by him – an issue that has haunted the political career of Alberto Núñez Feijóo: his relations with the drug trafficker from the island of Arosa, Marcial Dorado.
All you have to do is googling a bit: you type that name and there appears the photo of the candidate for the presidency of the PP government, much younger than now, together with a guy with a beard, also young. Both bare-chested aboard a yacht. The one who accompanies Feijóo is Marcial Dorado, considered one of the three most important smugglers on the Galician coast. Arrested on various occasions since the eighties, he was sentenced in 2009 to fourteen years in prison.
In the background of the photo in which Dorado and Feijóo appear, you can see the Cíes islands. A beautiful place whose visits are priced. Unless one has a yacht. It is the Vigo estuary in 1995. Few were unaware then that Dorado was a smuggler. Except for the PP candidate who even today says that he had no idea.
Pedro Sánchez left the message to Núñez Feijóo on television: "He has a duty to tell the truth to the Spanish people." Truth and lies weigh more heavily in this campaign than in any other.
It is not the first time that these photos have crossed Feijóo's path. In 2013, when, after the publication of the Bárcenas papers, everyone considered Rajoy dead, the newspaper El País published those images that are now circulating everywhere. The idea that some competitor in the PP decided to make them public to prevent Feijóo from launching into the race for the succession is not unreasonable. Be that as it may, the current leader of the PP, after its publication, disappeared from Madrid and cloistered himself in Galicia until three years later, in 2016, he obtained a new absolute majority. He then he believed that he had atoned for the sin. In this campaign, the leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz, Galician like Feijóo, was the first to bring up the photos at a rally, although for weeks now, these images, turned into more or less laughable memes, have been going around the networks.
How are some photos that have been around for ten years going to influence the campaign? Surely little, but the truth is that this second week of the campaign something is changing – which does not mean that it can significantly alter the expected result. The PP, which has been the builder of the electoral story in this chain of calls – municipal and now general – has lost the initiative.
Perhaps Feijóo's absence from the public television debate on Wednesday night was an added error. This is how some political scientists who follow the campaign have seen it. There is a relevant fact: the average audience of this debate was 4.1 million, the face to face 5.9 million. Although with a smaller audience, the figure is not negligible. In some communities, for example, Madrid, the screen share was close to 50 percent. There is interest in this campaign and many people are still waiting to decide what they are going to vote for on Sunday.
Feijóo, suffering from severe low back pain, was in Valencia yesterday, where he promised that he will make a law to prevent elections from being held in July and August, and warned of the price that ERC and Bildu will set for Sánchez to become president of the Government again. The last days of the campaign are always long and heavy, especially if you have already placed all the messages you had in the argument. Sometimes those days are too many for those who are ahead.
