PP and PSOE grease their machinery in Andalusia with the fear of a “grown up” Vox

The far-right force has not yet confirmed whether its headliner will be Macarena Olona, the most well-known deputy of the Congress of the formation. Her choice worries the PP headquarters. Some leaders of the leadership have been saying for days that perhaps Santiago abascal he chooses someone “unknown” and thus “he doesn’t lose her in Madrid”. The suspicion does not hide a fear: if Vox went from 1 to 13 seats in Castilla y León with an “unknown” like Juan García-Gallardo, what could Olona not achieve in Andalusia, where they already entered with 12 deputies in 2018? PSOE sources, on the other hand, focus on the fact that the deputy could “mobilize” the left-wing abstentionist voter and concludes that neither Vox nor the PP are interested in that. Abascal has weeks to spare to clear up the mystery.

These elections are capital for the PP because the drag of the new leader of the popular party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, will be measured at the polls, and because its objective will not only be to retain the presidency of the Board but to be able to continue in it without the need to include Vox in the Government. Feijóo, who boasts of having managed to keep the extreme right out of the Galician Parliament, tries to distance himself from Castilla y León, the first community in which the PP has agreed to share power with Vox. Elections were held before the fall of Paul Married and the current leader of the conservatives uses it as a shield. From now on, however, if Moreno needs to include the populists in his Executive, Feijóo will have no excuse and the message, before the municipal, regional and general elections of 2023, will be clear.

The Chairman of the Board will come out of this race with some polls indicating that he could even double his 26 current seats. Who you won’t be able to count on to partner with this time is citizens, to which the polls predict another collapse. Despite that, the oranges have ruled out going in coalition with the PP, something they already did in Euskadi (with resounding results). According to sources from Moreno’s team, the PP leader has managed “don’t be afraid” to the centrist voter in a “fundamentally socialist” community (they managed to remove the PSOE after 37 years in power).

To stop Vox, the PP candidate will prepare a campaign of closeness with farmers and ranchers and will also insistently repeat that Abascal and his people are skilled at pointing out “problems”, but not in giving “solutions” because they don’t know how to “manage”.

In the Andalusian PSOE, they admit that just as in the cities their rival “is the PP & rdquor ;, in the rural world, the barn that has historically cemented the party’s victories, their clear adversary “is vox”. The world of the countryside and the hunting sector —it is estimated that there are 250,000 hunters in Andalusia alone—, which have felt left out, if not punished by the Government of Pedro Sánchez, could turn in part towards the extreme right. “Vox fishes in the anger and despair, and there populism has a base. But it cannot be said that, for example, the mayor of Alcalá de los Gazules, in Cádiz, is anti-bullfighting, because that is not the case. The PSOE is Andalusian society itself and our social base has not been lost in three years,” analyzes a leader of the leadership of the general secretary and candidate for the Board, Juan Espadas.

In Ferraz, however, they are not so concerned about this infiltration of the Santiago Abascal formation, and they believe that the vote is disputed, as in other parts of Spain, with the PP, not with the PSOE, because “not all the field is hunting and from the Government farmers and ranchers have been helped with the negotiation of the Common Agrarian Policy, the law of the food chain or the reduction of workers due to the drought”. In March, the Secretary of Organization, Santos Cerdán, held a delegation from the Royal Spanish Hunting Federation (RFEC).The PSOE told him that it does not “combat” hunting and promised a more “balanced” wording of the welfare law animal promoted by United We Can, a text that the PSOE-A asks to “park for a while” so that it does not cloud the campaign.

To stop the penetration of Vox in the rural world and, above all, mobilize voters who stayed at home in the regional elections of 2018 and who nevertheless voted for Sánchez in the general elections of April 2019 (1,568,682 votes, due to the million scraped ballots that Susana Díaz harvested five months earlier), the Socialists will pull their main asset: its municipal force. rule in 458 of the total of 785 councils (60.42%), control four of the eight capitals (Seville, Granada, Huelva and Jaén) and preside over six councils.

“They, our terminals in the territory, in the rural world, are our main prescribers“, they remember in the team of Swords. In him, and in Ferraz, they add a fact: one of every 200 Andalusians is a militant of the PSOE. And another one: there are 8,000 houses of the town in the whole community. That is to say, that the capillarity of the party is key to mobilization, as is the electoral machinery, which is starting to heat up since the primaries last June, in which Espadas beat Díaz.

The PSOE-A hopes, at the very least, to repeat the result of 2018, 33 deputiesalthough he believes that he will be above and that he can even “gain“the elections. His strategy will be to wake up the half million abstentionists of the last autonomous elections and expand his base through the center – he believes that a part of the voters who bet on Cs can now opt for a candidate with a moderate profile such as Swords – and for the left, presenting itself as the useful vote, “the haven vote“of the progressive voters, in the face of the fragmentation by their left (Unidas Podemos, Más País and the anti-capitalists of Teresa Rodríguez).

Therefore, they conclude in the PSOE-A and in Ferraz, there is “party”, although they do not deny that it is complicated, and even more so, to recover the Board, because the PP is “strong”. But they remember that the campaigns hold surprises and are increasingly decisive and the PP “you can be scared“And they boast of having part of the work done: the program is already outlined and the lists, always a focus of internal tension, are approved on April 29 and without conflict with Ferraz. Sánchez, for his part, knows well that Andalusia is not Castilla y León is the traditional socialist fiefdom, the community that contributes the most votes and deputies to Congress. Not rescuing the Board would weigh on his backpack, although in his leadership they remember that he won in the two general elections of 2019 without Andalusia being in his hands.