Five years ago, four political leaders faced each other in the electoral debate prior to the general elections on April 28, 2019. Three of them, Pablo Casado, Albert Rivera and Pablo Iglesias, have changed their profession. Only Pedro Sánchez, leader of the PSOE and current president of the Government, remains. The image of that meeting on the TVE set shows, on its fifth anniversary, the dizzying pace that Spanish politics has acquired, capable of engulfing leaders and parties in less than the duration of a legislature. It also shows that there are classics of today and always, acquired vices, irreconcilable positions.
Leaders and parties
Pedro Sanchez He was, on April 22, 47 years old and had been President of the Government for 326 days after winning, in June 2018, the motion of censure against Mariano Rajoy motivated by the first major ruling of the Gürtel case. He had won the PSOE primaries over Susana Díaz and Patxi López, his current parliamentary spokesperson, and a few weeks before the debate he had published Resistance manual, the book where he narrates his complicated journey – with internal and external obstacles – until he reached La Moncloa. The PSOE faced that first government after the motion with only 85 deputies in Congress, 52 less than the PP. The Popular Party today has the same seats as then (137), but the Socialists have reduced that distance to 16. The autonomous power of the PSOE has diminished since then: in April 2019 they had already lost one of their fiefdoms, Andalusia; They presided over six regional governments and co-governed three others; Now they only preside over the Principality of Asturias, Navarra and Castilla-La Mancha, and they hope to reissue the bipartite with the PNV in Euskadi.
Pablo Casado He was the first national leader of the PP elected in primaries and until now, the only one. The confrontation between his rivals, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría and María Dolores de Cospedal, who canceled each other, catapulted him to the presidency of the party just nine months before the debate. He was 37 years old. In January 2019, in a decision that was highly criticized internally due to his lack of experience, he had launched her friend Isabel Díaz Ayuso as a candidate for the presidency of the Community of Madrid and ambassador of what he called “the right.” without complex”. In his debut at the polls, Casado crashed resoundingly: the PP hit the ground with 66 deputies. In the November re-election he rose 22 seats. And they didn't give him any more opportunities. In February 2022, he was defenestrated by his party due to the open confrontation with his most personal and risky bet, Ayuso, and the internal unrest due to the management of his general secretary, Teodoro García Egea. Without the traumatic primaries of 2018, but with all the drama of a political burial of a body present, in April 2022, the popular ones entrusted themselves to Alberto Núñez Feijóo. The former Galician president won the first general elections last July, but did not achieve a majority to support his investiture and has the same problems as his predecessor: the prominence of the Madrid president and his relationship with Vox. Feijóo has endorsed bipartite agreements with the extreme right in four autonomies—five if Castilla y León, agreed upon in the internal transition in the PP, is included.
Albert Rivera. The leader of Ciudadanos, who had been elected president of the party in alphabetical order, resigned just seven months after that debate, when, after the repeat election in November, his party went from 57 to 10 deputies. He was about to turn 40 years old. After the April elections he had refused to agree with the PSOE, with which he had an absolute majority. A little more than a year before that debate, in February 2018, CS was the first force in the country in vote estimates, according to Metroscopia. Rivera's replacement, Inés Arrimadas, has also abandoned politics: in June last year, after a succession of electoral fiascos, she announced her retirement. The formation no longer presented itself to the general elections last July. The majority of Ciudadanos leaders chose to join the PP or change jobs.
Pablo Iglesias. The co-founder of Podemos became vice president of the Government nine months after that debate, in January 2020, after the electoral repetition of November 2019. A hug with Sánchez sealed, just 48 hours after the elections, the agreement that had been unable to reach since July. Against almost all odds, the marriage of convenience worked relatively well, but 15 months later, Iglesias left the Executive to face Ayuso as a candidate for the presidency of the Community of Madrid and designated Yolanda Díaz as his successor. The bet did not go well: Podemos was the fifth force in the Madrid Assembly and the disagreements with Díaz began shortly after. In May 2021, Iglesias announced that he was leaving politics. He was 43 years old. Podemos now has four deputies in Congress who, after the break with Sumar, Díaz's platform, went to the Mixed Group, where they share space with the socialist José Luis Ábalos, who refused to renounce the act after the scandal of the Kold caseeither. Proof of the magnitude of the fall of Podemos's space are the videos of the last general election night before that four-way debate, in June 2016, when they appeared with Izquierda Unida. Iglesias, crestfallen, said: “We expected different results. It is time to reflect.” They had won 72 seats. Today they count them on the fingers of one hand.
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The agenda: territorial debate, partners and pacts
That April 22, 2019, the debate was divided into four blocks: Economy, Welfare State, Territorial Policy and post-electoral pacts, but the last two monopolized almost the entire conversation and contaminated the rest of the issues. “We will not talk about Education, or Health, or climate change, or the economy, or anything,” Rivera even said, “if [Quim] Torra, then Catalan president]continues to rule over the rest.” It still happens: in Congress there is more talk about who the agreement is made with than what is agreed upon. At that time, with the leaders of the processes ―except for those on the run, like Puigdemont―, imprisoned, Casado and Rivera pressed Sánchez with the possibility of a pardon. The leader of the PSOE asked not to advance events because there was still no firm condemnation – it arrived a few months later, in October. His government finally approved them two years later, in 2021. The amnesty law now extends the fight over the pardons, in the same way that Puigdemont has replaced Torra as the protagonist of the right-wing discourse. Rivera took the framed photo of a meeting between Sánchez and Torra in La Moncloa to the lectern and in its final minute he uttered a phrase that would be widely commented on: “Do you hear him? It is the silence. The silence that chilled the blood of millions of Spaniards when the separatists wanted to break up our country in Catalonia.” Casado accused the socialist leader of endangering the unity of Spain by making an agreement with the independentistas and “the pro-ETA members of Bildu.” The PSC won the last Catalan elections, in 2021, but failed to form a sufficient majority to govern, as happened to Arrimadas, from Ciudadanos, in 2017. The policy of pacts has monopolized every electoral call since that April 2019, with the parties of the coalition government reproaching the PP for its alliances with Vox and the right, blaming the left for the agreements with the Catalan independence movement and the left abertzale by Arnaldo Otegi.
The other main protagonist of that debate was corruption. Sánchez exploited the conviction for Gürtel case who promoted him to La Moncloa and, addressing Casado, recalled that 12 PP ministers had been investigated and that nine regional presidents had been convicted or charged. “The headquarters of Genoa is the great bazaar of corruption,” he insisted. Five years later, the PP puts pressure on the PSOE with the scandal that affects the former advisor of the former Minister of Development José Luis Ábalos, Koldo García, who testified this Monday before the Senate investigation commission. Several of the causes linked to the popular ones that Sánchez pointed out in that 2019 electoral debate are still pending, such as that of the Kitchen case or those that affect Rodrigo Rato, Luis Bárcenas or Eduardo Zaplana.
The tension has grown worse and has extended to the judicial institutions. The General Council of the Judiciary had already expired a few months ago in April 2019 and five years later, it is still not renewed. Curiously, in that debate it was Iglesias, one of the leaders most critical of the judiciary, who said: “Spanish justice deserves a certain respect.” He was referring to the political anger over the possible pardons of the I processeds before the sentence had occurred. The socialists believed that the main source of problems with Podemos when forming the coalition government was going to be precisely Catalonia, but in the end, both showed more harmony than they expected in the face of the sovereignty challenge.
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