"I'm going to make it clear," the PSOE organization secretary, Santos Cerdán, warned on Monday to stop any internal lucubration. “Totally ruled out that big Sunday. Elections when they touch. It has no more debate ”, the socialist leader from Ferraz has settled. The strategic possibility that Pedro Sánchez chooses to advance the date of the general elections -scheduled for December 2023-, to make them coincide with the appointment with the municipal and regional polls next May 2022, is not on the table . Not even as a mere hypothesis. The President of the Government himself has always put the need for political and institutional stability first, in order to deal with the energy and inflationary crisis and continue to deploy a broad agenda of social measures and the expansion of civil rights, in the face of any partisan and electoral interest.
While the Government finalizes its new general state budget project for next year, which the Council of Ministers could approve tomorrow if the agreement between the PSOE and United We Can is closed on time, Cerdán has insisted on defending institutional stability. "Budgets when they touch, and elections when they touch", he has reiterated. In the absence of Pedro Sánchez -this Monday on a trip to Mallorca-, the federal executive of the PSOE has analyzed the issue during their meeting. And none of those present, among whom were the ministers María Jesús Montero or Isabel Rodríguez, has defended the possibility of contemplating or defending said electoral “super Sunday”. Quite the contrary.
Because in the leadership of the PSOE they are very aware, precisely, that what they need is time to continue reversing the demographic forecasts and dismantling the so-called Feijóo effect, with which the leader of the Popular Party tries to promote a change in the political cycle throughout Spain. In Ferraz they recognize that the socialist electorate remains demobilized, and that they are still going to have to "chop stone" to deactivate the wind in favor that Alberto Núñez Feijóo enjoys in most of the polls, and to take flight in the face of the wear and tear that he suffers the Government after the succession of supervening crises, from the coronavirus pandemic to the war in Ukraine. The calendar managed by the Socialists, however, still offers them a margin of almost a year and a half until the general elections. So precipitating events with an electoral advance they consider would not make any sense.
Santos Cerdán, however, has ensured that the PSOE and the PP are now in a situation of "technical tie" in terms of the intention to vote predicted by the polls, while the public, in his opinion, continues to value in a majority way more positive to Sánchez than to the leader of the PP. “We are correcting the Feijóo effect, and the transfer of votes from the PSOE to the PP is already less than when Feijóo came to preside over the PP. But what we do see is that the PSOE vote is less mobilized today than the PP or Vox voter may be, ”admitted Ferraz's organization secretary.
“Our purpose is to mobilize and activate that PSOE voter, who today is true that he is demobilized, and we are in the task of mobilizing him,” Cerdán assured. In this strategy of mobilizing the socialist electorate, Sánchez will continue to lead the campaign of "The Government of the people", with acts planned throughout Spain, in addition to wielding a fiscal policy that protects the middle classes against "the law of the jungle ” and the “every man for himself” that the socialists attribute to Feijóo.
