Sometimes it seems like it didn’t happen. There is hardly any talk about it in Pedro Sánchez’s circle. In internal meetings it is not mentioned, at most ironically, with some joke. The episode of the president’s threatened resignation, which kept the PSOE in suspense because many leaders thought that the decision to say goodbye had been made, has been left behind in a surprisingly quick manner. The result of the Catalan elections, which has returned the socialists to a euphoria even greater than what they experienced after July 23, 2023, has completely erased the last doubts left by those days in which many thought that everything was over . Sánchez has returned to the offensive, as he has demonstrated in his public appearances these days, and once again he has put the campaign on his back, this time the European elections.
The PP hopes to deal a very hard blow to the president and the Government in these elections and take up to seven points from the PSOE, after converting them again into a plebiscite on Sánchez and thus mobilizing the right. But after the success of the PSC, in La Moncloa they believe that things have changed a lot and expectations are different. This Saturday, at a rally in Barcelona, the leader of the PSOE even had the luxury of predicting that they will beat the PP in the European elections. It is a practically impossible objective, because the PP is going to absorb the entire vote of Ciudadanos and will have a very easy time being the most voted. But now the socialists do believe it is possible to reduce the great distance that the polls predicted in the most difficult elections for any government, where the punishment vote is very simple, because it has no direct consequences, and on the contrary it is very difficult to mobilize the progressives to support the Executive.
In any case, various members of the government and the PSOE consulted point out that the really important elections, those that had underlying political consequences, were the Catalan ones. And that the result is so extraordinary – Salvador Illa reached 42 seats and the independence movement was very far from gaining a majority, the two main objectives – that it gives Sánchez and his team such strong political support that the Europeans, whatever the result, will not prevent the legislature from consolidating and the president can have several months of calm ahead as long as Junts and ERC, his two essential allies, do not decide to leave the majority or make it impossible to approve the Budgets at the end of the year. The open internal debate in ERC is what worries the most in this sense, but in La Moncloa they trust that the majority will hold out.
“Catalonia has become our main argument. The right has been left with nothing. Is all your opposition really about removing Begoña Gómez in a case that does not hold up? And when it is archived? What has happened in Catalonia is very fundamental and deactivates criticism from the right for a long time. Even conservative journalists are agreeing with us,” claims a minister. At the rally in Barcelona, Sánchez insisted on this idea: “Feijóo and Abascal look to the processes independence with longing. Because when coexistence wins, Feijóo and Abascal are left without speech.”
The president has completely left behind the episode of doubts about his future and now seems determined to make any debate about that disappear in the PSOE, much less about a possible succession. “They are not going to break me,” he insisted on Friday in La Sexta. According to several people who know him well, what he did was completely atypical of his resilient personality, and now he has returned to his natural place, on the offensive and emboldened by the success in Catalonia. Sánchez does not regret what he did, those around him point out, and in fact he believes that many understood that he showed his doubts, his weakness, especially the younger generations, but in any case he considers that episode over and has returned to his line former.
The Sánchez of these days looks much more like the one from July 2023 than the one who announced in a letter that he was going to reflect on whether he should resign due to the harassment of his family. And in fact, from a political point of view, the president is trying to recover the spirit of July 2023 that led to an extraordinary mobilization of progressives to stop the extreme right. To do this, he is helped by the Argentine president Javier Milei, who precisely at this moment of the start of the European campaign has traveled to Madrid to participate in a major meeting of the European extreme right organized by Santiago Abascal. “The far-right international meets in Spain. Milei says that social justice is an aberration. And they choose Spain to meet because we represent as a society everything they hate: feminism, social justice, labor dignity, a strong welfare state, democracy,” the leader of the PSOE claimed this Saturday in Barcelona. Sánchez and his campaign team seek precisely to mobilize progressive voters against the real, not fictitious, risk of a Europe dominated by the extreme right, which aspires to everything in these elections and for the first time could have a relevant weight in the European Commission that arises after the polls.
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This Wednesday, Sánchez will star in a long debate in Congress that he will try to focus on this issue, which is decisive for Europe. A third of Europeans already live under governments in which the extreme right participates, whether national, regional or local. And his arrival in the European institutions, especially the European Commission if the traditional right of the European People’s Party opens the door, could completely change the political and economic line of Europe. The president is preparing a speech in that sense, to explain in detail what is at stake in these elections.
From the exit from the crisis with European funds, with mutualization of the debt – all Europeans jointly assume the risk of that debt, something unprecedented that has happened for the first time after the covid crisis – we could move on to a new stage of austerity , adjustments and reduction of the European welfare state, less Budgets. In addition to toughening policies on sensitive issues such as immigration but also on equality policies, on LGTBI rights. With all this, and with the announcement of the day on which he will recognize the state of Palestine, Sánchez will try to use Congress to set the framework for the European elections that he wants, but he will also have to face an opposition that needs to hit him, recover the initiative and change the axis towards a plebiscite for the president himself. From there, everything will be a campaign. And only after these elections will the legislature truly begin, for the first time with more than a year ahead without elections, as long as there is no repetition in Catalonia.
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