New year, new electoral cycle. Once the presidency of the Central Government has been revalidated, and with the legislature underway despite its multiple uncertainties, Pedro Sánchez will face the 2024 election, as always throughout his entire political career, wearing his campaign suit. And with three electoral dates, at least, highlighted in the calendar: the Galician elections on February 18, the Basque elections scheduled for spring and the European elections on June 9.
After strengthening the political and technical profile of the Spanish Government, with the remodeling that he carried out on Friday, Sánchez sees that the time has now come to strengthen the PSOE as well, with replacements in the Ferraz executive and an update of the strategy and the political project to face this electoral cycle. The aim, they say, is to "rearm ideologically".
Without wasting time. The PSOE will hold a political conference on January 20 and 21 in A Coruña - to focus on the first of the dates with the ballot boxes, in Galicia - with the aim of renewing its project and ideology. Sánchez will take advantage of the appointment to also convene meetings of the party's federal committee, the highest decision-making body between congresses, and of the federal executive. In the two conclaves, the changes that will be made to the top of the party will be proposed and ratified. Many are obliged by the formation of the new Government.
To begin with, the representation of the PSOE executive is vacant, after its current holder, Minister Pilar Alegría, assumed the role of spokesperson in the Executive. It remains to be defined whether the new one will be choral, depending on the topics to be highlighted, or will fall to a single leader.
And several cadres will also be relieved after their recent appointments to the Executive as secretaries of State or general directors, among them Arcadi España - until now secretary of Transport - or Beatriz Carrillo - secretary of Social Policies -.
The leader of the Andalusian Socialists, Juan Espadas, will join the new executive as spokesperson in the Senate in place of the Catalan Eva Granados, also appointed Secretary of State, and there will be a relief in the representation of the PSC in this body, in which Miquel Iceta also had a place as secretary of Democratic Memory. Iceta is now Spain's ambassador to Unesco.
Sánchez will thus set the course for the new electoral cycle. After the socialist disaster of the municipal and regional elections in May, especially in terms of loss of institutional power in communities and town councils, the general elections in July registered a comeback in which the PSOE recovered a million votes. And they warn Ferraz that in this new legislature, and despite the controversial amnesty for those accused of the process, "there is not a great wear and tear taking place". In fact, they point out that all polls continue to place them above 30% of the vote, which is beginning to be an exception among European social democratic parties.
At the political conference in A Coruña, the socialist candidate for the Xunta, José Ramón Gómez Besteiro, will have a stellar role reserved. The leadership of the PSOE believe that they have, in these elections, "the best candidate", who also brings together the Galician socialists after years of internal turmoil.
His first objective in this first date with the ballot boxes of the year is to articulate a "majority of leftists" that can end the 14 consecutive years of PP governments in the Xunta, first with Alberto Núñez Feijóo and now with his successor, Alfonso Rueda.
Sánchez will try to deal a definitive blow to Feijóo's leadership in the PP if the majority of the left manages to evict Rueda from the Xunta. The PSOE point out that Feijóo left the presidency of the Xunta and took the reins of the PP to be president of the Spanish government, but he did not achieve his electoral goal. "And if the PP loses Galicia now, it will be the worst political move of the last 30 years, it would be an absolute disaster."
The second objective for the PSOE in these Galician elections is to advance the BNG, which in 2020, with Ana Pontón, already took the leadership of the opposition from it. But Ferraz points out that the priority, in order to evict the PP from the Xunta, is to "maximize the results of the left", so that their candidacies "add up and don't remain". In this sense, the Socialists celebrated the pre-agreement announced on Wednesday between Sumar and Podemos, despite their break in Congress. The joy didn't last long. On Saturday, the militancy, led by Pablo Iglesias, agreed to turn its back on this agreement.
