The catastrophic outcome of the interview on SER with which Pedro Sánchez inaugurated the political season, after a long month of break, with his cold and indifferent tone regarding the serious situation in Ceuta, and in which he defended Morocco’s role, avoided self-criticism, and even hinted at being a political victim of the “migration crisis,” forced La Moncloa to hastily arrange a new interview on TVE for this Wednesday. A friendlier territory even than the PRISA network where Sánchez was able to present himself as a president without responsibilities in the fronts the Government has open – Ceuta, the wide range of corruption, PISA – between spectator and victim, besides considering himself the target of a brutal attack by the “far-right international,” and making it clear that, lacking a set election date, he has already entered the campaign.
An electoral logic that explains why he shows more concern for the Supreme Court urgently endorsing the right to vote for grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Argentine exiled Spaniards – when most of them have never lived in Spain – significantly altering the electoral census, than for the critical situation in which the people of Ceuta find themselves, or proclaiming that the “best of Spains” was that of the Second Republic.
Everything in the Government is now polarization and polling calculation. Each of his words and actions, stirring social and political division between the democratic left and the “reactionary bloc” formed by the PP, Vox, the judges, and the media, follows an electoral script, in which political confrontation and citizen anger, for example with the Government’s actions in Ceuta, Sánchez believes benefits him at the polls.
Deepening the division of Spain into two irreconcilable blocs – presenting the demonstrations in support of Ceuta as a fascist campaign – is part of a strategy to mobilize left-wing votes, retain them through tension – a kind of call to arms – and keep them captive in his candidacy, preventing vote transfer from one bloc to another. In this way, any criticism or demonstration against the Government becomes a confirmation of that hybrid civil war climate with which Sánchez wants to envelop the elections.
Most polls, in which the PSOE maintains its number of seats and, therefore, chances to govern, give Sánchez’s plan the right. Also the configuration of the international political scenario: in many Western democracies, the rise of populist parties will mean that elections will exclusively decide the clash between the new far left – in which Sánchez’s PSOE is a reference – and the new far right, erasing from the equation the old social-democratic, liberal, and Christian-democratic parties. It is the end of any moderate option based on old consensuses.
By equating the PP with Vox, and at the same time equating these two parties with Alternative for Germany, Le Penism, or MAGA Trumpism, the PSOE leader is achieving, first, that the Populars gradually dissolve into this de facto coalition with Abascal’s party, trapping the PP in this formula. Then, to present the general elections as a plebiscite between those “two Spains” desired by the left and in which Sánchez, who has already publicly dismissed the possibility of alternation – a way of saying that democracy is him – will appeal to Basque, Catalan, and Galician nationalists under the dichotomy of advancing hand in hand towards a confederal Spain – a new Pact of San Sebastián – or the centralist regression with a fascist government.
Thus, freeing oneself from this deceitful corset built by Sánchez, breaking the dialectic of opposing blocs to approach an absolute majority, is the main challenge Alberto Núñez Feijóo must solve if he wants to govern Spain.