Six days before the European elections, there was no trace of the PP’s electoral program. After the criticism received, the popular ones made it public in the final stretch of the campaign, with haste and some repeated measures. The program was missing because the main proposal of Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s party for the Spaniards called to elect their representatives in the European Parliament was an envelope to “respond” to the letter in which Pedro Sánchez communicated that he was taking five days to think about whether continued or not. “We have a great opportunity to change this Government,” insisted the parliamentary spokesperson, Miguel Tellado. The campaign videos, the rallies, the statements in interviews revolved around the plebiscite against Sánchez, as had happened before with other regional and municipal calls in which neither Feijóó nor the leader of the PSOE were candidates. The PP won the European elections in June as it won the general elections last July, but it has lost again against its own expectations.
With all the tailwind after the indictment of the president’s wife; the admission for processing of another complaint from the extreme right-wing pseudo-union Clean Hands against Sánchez’s brother; the scandal of Koldo case, the investigation commissions for the purchase of masks and the approval in Congress of the controversial amnesty law ―with which they hoped to demobilize the PSOE voter after skirting the issue in the Catalan campaign―, the popular ones prevailed over the socialists in the elections this Sunday by only two seats and four points ahead. “The PP wins by the minimum: it takes two deputies away from the PSOE from the amnesty and from the accused Begoña Gómez,” summarized the conservative media Ok diary; “I’m perplexed, it’s a notable failure,” said the digital’s number two last night. The debate, whose director assured a few weeks ago that Sánchez was going to have the “most tragic possible” ending.
Feijóo insists on the “change of political cycle”, but it does not arrive. On the ideological self-placement scale, with 0 being the extreme left and 10 being the extreme right, Spaniards place themselves, on average, at 4.7, slightly to the left, according to the latest 40dB survey. for the country. PP voters place themselves, on average, at 6.6. The advantage of the Popular Party over the PSOE in the European elections is 701,000 votes, of which 448,700 correspond to the Community of Madrid, where the Socialists have a problem (12.5 points disadvantage) similar to that of the Popular Party in Catalonia (16 .85 points below the PSOE, which won the regional elections in May). Both communities contribute, respectively, 37 and 48 deputies to Congress. Andalusia, where the difference in the European elections was 5.68 points in favor of the PP, elects another 61.
Unequal fight against respective competitors
The change in cycle actually occurred in 2015, when the two-party system went from bringing together 73.39% of the votes in 2011 to 50%. In those elections, the emergence of two new competitors, Ciudadanos on the right and Podemos on the left, caused the Popular Party to lose 63 seats and the Socialists, 20. Spanish politics from that moment on is summarized in the fight between the parties that lead both ideological blocks to recover lost ground and in the need for pacts to be able to govern. The result of this struggle is unequal. The PP has engulfed Ciudadanos, but in the 2019 elections it launched a new competitor, Vox, which debuted with 24 seats and now has 33 in Congress. Feijóo, who blessed the government agreements with the extreme right after the regional and municipal elections last May, has not managed to neutralize the threat of Santiago Abascal, whose European list has taken 9.62% of the ballots, and whom already includes in its “bloc”, as the party verbalized this Sunday in a statement after passing through the polls. In addition, another rival has emerged from the right, Se Acabó La Fiesta, which debuts in Strasbourg with 4.6% of the votes. Meanwhile, Sánchez’s PSOE has been recovering space: Podemos, which came first in voting intention after the 2014 European elections, went from 69 seats in 2015 to 71 in 2016, 42 in April 2019 and 35 in November of that anus. The Sumar platform, which brought together the party founded by Pablo Iglesias for only five months after the July elections, obtained 12.33% of the votes in the last general elections and 4.65% in the European elections on Sunday. Podemos kept 3.28% of the ballots for Strasbourg. On the tenth anniversary of the party, one of its founders, Juan Carlos Monedero, pointed out the recovery of the PSOE as one of the factors in the fall of that political space: “Now Sánchez finds it funny to the young people, who call him Perro Sanxe. Zapatero seems Bolivarian. Furthermore, it is enough for them to receive attacks from the right to appear Bolsheviks.”
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The game of sums between blocks and who recovers the most ground over their competitors is decisive because the alliance with Vox isolates the PP – eight different formations supported Sánchez’s investiture -, and if the socialists fail to compensate for the fall in space to their left as well They have a difficult time gathering a sufficient majority again.
Differences between the Sánchez-Rajoy and Sánchez-Feijóo duels
Feijóo celebrates the four points advantage over the PSOE in the European elections and this Sunday he stated that the last time the PP won the elections to the Strasbourg Parliament, it also won the general elections and governed. He also boasted of having obtained “the best results of the PP in European elections in 25 years.” In reality, the Popular Party obtained almost eight points more in the 2009 European Parliament elections than last Sunday and in the 2004 elections, 7 more points. Regarding the differences with the PSOE, the largest was in 1999: 4.4 points and 933,000 votes ahead.
In Sánchez’s duels against the different leaders of the PP, Mariano Rajoy also prevails over Feijóo in terms of the advantage obtained over the socialist leader, who assumed the general secretary of the party between 2014 and 2016 and again from 2018, it is That is to say, he has been a candidate for general elections on five occasions. In 2015, Rajoy won by 6.7 points and in 2016, by 10.4. In the last ones that the party won, Feijóo’s first, last July, that distance was reduced to 1.38.
In the municipal elections of May 2023, Feijóo’s PP led the PSOE by 3.4 points. The Popular Party managed to snatch from the Socialists in those elections, also autonomous in 12 communities, the governments of the Valencian Community, Aragon, La Rioja, Extremadura, the Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands and Cantabria, in most cases, thanks to agreements with Vox. The leader of the PP, who has insisted since the July general elections that he should occupy La Moncloa having been the party with the most votes, joined with the extreme right to prevail over the first force, the PSOE, in Extremadura and the Canary Islands and several large cities. Feijóo has overcome the poor results of Pablo Casado, but has allowed Abascal’s party to consolidate, which the Xunta criticized – “I cannot resign myself to seeing populism in Congress”; “We must not fall into the traps of nostalgic postulates. We have not been xenophobic, unsupportive, reactionary. We leave that to other parties,” he said – and the projection of the results of the European elections on Sunday to the Spanish Parliament indicates that it would no longer only need to ally with Vox, but with the brand that emerged to the right of the extreme right and whose main proposal is to build a huge prison for Sánchez.
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