Victory has many fathers, as often happens in politics, while defeat is an orphan. Pedro Sánchez met yesterday with the federal executive of the PSOE to make a first assessment of the damage from the electoral collapse suffered the day before in Galicia. And, according to his spokesperson, Esther Peña, the conclusion is that the result of the Galician polls responded to indigenous territorial criteria, not in a state key. Without the scrutiny reflecting, therefore, a vote of punishment for Sánchez or his policies or alliances at the head of the Government.
Nor because of the controversial Amnesty law, still under discussion between the PSOE and Junts, which according to Peña “has not been a factor that has defined or influenced the results” in Galicia. The proof that the amnesty did not interfere in the 18-F, alleged the socialist spokesperson, is that the BNG grew like foam and took a good part of the PSdeG vote, despite the fact that Ana Pontón's party “clearly supports the amnesty and he is sovereign.”
In any case, Ferraz's management wanted to assume the bad results. “We do not want to nor can we stop self-criticism,” Peña admitted. “The PSOE does not hide when it has a setback,” he assured.
But those who do not console themselves are because they do not want to, and the socialist spokesperson assured that, despite the 14% of the vote garnered by the candidacy of José Ramón Gómez Besteiro, “we are not residual in any autonomous community.” And she recalled that the PP, on the other hand, barely reached 6% of the vote in Euskadi and 4% in Catalonia in its last elections. These are, precisely, the next regional elections scheduled on the calendar. “There we will meet again,” Peña challenged the PP.
“We understand the euphoria of the PP,” admitted Ferraz's spokesperson, after Alberto Núñez Feijóo's party remained in her opinion “in shock” since it failed to govern after the general elections on July 23. “The PP needed joy,” she ironically said. “But these data are irrefutable,” she insisted, regarding the poor electoral momentum of the PP in Euskadi and Catalonia.
Excluding the amnesty or the pacts with the independence movement, Ferraz attributes the electoral collapse in Galicia to three causes. Firstly, the short time that Besteiro had to consolidate himself as an alternative, after seven years out of the game due to judicial accusations that came to nothing, given the electoral advance of President Alfonso Rueda to revalidate the position.
A time that the PSOE claims was lacking for Besteiro and more than enough for Pontón, after years of “crushing stone” in Galicia, which resulted in the “strong push” of the BNG at the polls. Thus, they explain as a second reason the “obvious flow of votes” to the BNG, which left the PSdeG in its worst historical record. The third reason they give is the proven “resilience” of the PP in its Galician bastion, which benefited from an extra mobilization of its electorate in the face of the threat from the BNG.
Sánchez, in any case, shielded Besteiro after the electoral fiasco, and demanded to consolidate the territorial leaderships. “We believe in medium and long-term projects, a political option needs time to permeate society,” highlighted Peña, who pointed to Besteiro as the “natural leader” of Galician socialism. “The fundamental key to regaining trust is long-term projects.” And she used another saying to support Besteiro: “The land, for those who work it.”
