What will happen in the regional elections in May? Will the electorate vote thinking about the management of their autonomous community or will they do so influenced by the noise of Spanish politics? According to the latest CIS macro-survey on "regional voting trends", between a third and more than 40% of those consulted will cast their vote prioritizing "general issues in Spain".
The communities where Spanish politics will weigh the most when deciding the vote will be Castilla-La Mancha (49%) and Comunitat Valenciana (44%). And the most focused on their particular situation will be Navarra, Asturias, Aragón, Madrid, the Balearic Islands and La Rioja, where between 55% and 67% of those consulted consider "their own issues more important".
The problem with this indicator is that it coexists interchangeably with regional voting intentions favorable to the PSOE or the PP, without being able to establish any direct correlation. In addition, the small size of the samples that make up the survey relativizes any forecast and makes estimations difficult. Consequently, it seems more useful to review the degree of citizen satisfaction with the management carried out by each regional Executive and its president.
However, the evaluation of the different regional governments is not conclusive either: the best mark (slightly above 5.4) is obtained by Navarra, Aragón and the Canary Islands. And the worst is harvested by Extremadura (4.45), Cantabria (4.87) and Madrid (4.96). Asturias and Castilla-La Mancha, and, with a 5.16, Valencia are located in the zone of approved scraping. But since these margins are quite narrow, we must focus on the management of the respective regional presidents to better measure the degree of satisfaction of citizens with their regional Executive.
In this sense, the best valued president is that of Aragon (almost 60% judge his management to be good or very good), followed by that of the Canary Islands (58%) and that of Navarra (57%); that is, the communities where the regional Executive achieves the best grade. From then on, the correlations are less clear: the Government of Castilla-La Mancha barely approves, but more than 55% of those consulted judge the management of its president to be good or very good. And above the 50% threshold are also found in La Rioja, Valencia and Asturias.
In the caboose (and coinciding with the worst marks for government management) appear Madrid, Cantabria and Extremadura, where half or more of those consulted judge the performance of their regional president to be bad or very bad. In Madrid, health management (with the worst grade of all the autonomies) would explain Ayuso's poor assessment. In Extremadura, on the other hand, the abandonment of the railway could justify the suspension of the regional management, since health or education obtain clear approvals.
In the case of Extremadura, these negative perceptions about the socialist management translate into a decided vote in favor of the PP. But that logic is not imposed everywhere. In Madrid, and despite the suspense that the regional government reaps, the advantage of the popular over the PSOE exceeds 15 points. The Socialists only register clear margins in Asturias, Castilla-La Mancha, the Canary Islands, Navarra, Aragón or La Rioja. But they touch the draw in Valencia and lose in Murcia. And, furthermore, the range of seats offered by the CIS – of up to 13 deputies and generated by the limited sample size of the survey – are so wide and leave everything so open, that the public institute seems to have limited itself to monitoring uncertainty.
