Diluted the serious threat wielded by Volkswagen, Pedro Sánchez took advantage of the fact that yesterday he starred in a PSOE rally in Baza (Granada) to celebrate as "extraordinary news" the announcement that the German multinational will maintain its commitment to invest up to 10,000 million euros in Spain .
But the President of the Government must have bit his tongue so as not to congratulate his Minister of Industry, Reyes Maroto, for the agreement, and thus fuel even more expectations about his next candidacy to run for mayor of Madrid in the elections municipal councils on May 28, 2023.
The explanation is that Sánchez was in Andalusia, and besides, he still hasn't played. The fiasco of this multimillion-dollar industrial project would have penalized Maroto's option as an electoral poster, but his continuity puts a candidacy on track that for now the PSOE is reluctant to confirm.
In the direction of Ferraz, however, they admit that "everything points" to Maroto being the electoral candidate in the capital. “Except for a major surprise, which is not expected,” they warn. The intention is to hold on to present the candidacy for mayor of Madrid until next week, just days before the primary process starts on November 21.
The appointment of Maroto, already shuffled in countless internal pools of the PSOE for Madrid since Sánchez signed her as Minister of Industry, Commerce and Tourism, in June 2018, could disappoint the high expectations generated in the long months in which it was decided to keep an absolute silence on the socialist candidacy for the capital before the next municipal elections. But that was precisely the agreed strategy, as recognized in Ferraz, to try to recover the electoral pulse of the PSOE in the municipality of Madrid. Start by feeding expectations about who would lead the candidacy.
In Ferraz they remember that the party is at a minimum in the capital. In the last municipal elections, in May 2019, the candidacy of Pepu Hernández, the former national basketball coach, signed by Sánchez, obtained the worst historical record of the PSOE: with just 13.7% of the votes, it sank to the fourth position, behind More Madrid, the Popular Party and Ciudadanos.
Now in Moncloa and in Ferraz they are realists and do not aspire to win in the capital, as they assume. But they also warn that the PP mayor, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, is now "more vulnerable." And that if the PSOE manages to revive, and even overtake a More Madrid that no longer has Manuela Carmena as the headliner, it could "make viable a majority of the left" that would threaten Almeida's continuity. "We can give the PP a scare in Madrid," they predict.
The decision to postpone the announcement of the candidacy for the capital also sought to "give a tour and protagonism" to Juan Lobato, the leader of the Madrid Socialists, in front of the now impregnable electoral bastion of Isabel Díaz Ayuso in the Community of Madrid. And the serious crisis of health management that broke out for the Madrid president invites the Socialists not to divert attention with the announcement of her candidacy in the capital, so that this controversy, and the new white tides already called, manage to weaken to Ayuso.
But next week the organic deadline to open the primary process expires, and Sánchez will reveal his bet to try to get the PSOE to recover the electoral pulse in Madrid.
