The PSOE activates the ‘antireactionary’ alert against the right for 23J

2023-06-16 22:23:04

It is not the “anti-fascist alert” that Pablo Iglesias launched after the 2018 Andalusian elections, but it is similar to it. With just over a month to go before the general elections on July 23, the PSOE is busy pointing out that the alliance between the PP and Vox, embodied in town halls and autonomies to govern hand in hand, threatens to become “a wave reactionary” that, if it reaches La Moncloa, can destroy everything.

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“From here I appeal to all progressives in Spain. We are more than the conservatives, if we mobilize and vote on July 23, we will be able to stop this ultra-conservative wave,” said the socialists’ municipal policy secretary, Alfonso Rodríguez Gómez de Celis, in charge of activating that alert during a appearance in Ferraz this Friday prior to the constitution of the municipalities.

That message of “fear of the extreme right” has already been used as a political strategy in other electoral events with little success. On this occasion, however, the Socialists believe that there are nuances that could imply the reaction and mass activation of the progressive electorate, the great aspiration of the left for July 23 to be able to compensate for the high levels of mobilization of the right.

Negotiated in a matter of hours with a man convicted of sexist violence, with a bullfighter vice president who does not hide his sympathy for the Franco regime and with the delivery of powers of as much weight as Justice, Culture or Agriculture, in the PSOE they see this pact endorsed by Feijóo as the definitive signature that the Galician politician has forever linked his fate to the extreme right.

“It is a shameful pact. They have gone from the red lines to the red carpet with Vox”, said the socialist deputy general secretary and finance minister, María Jesús Montero, this week in an interview on TVE. “They should be ashamed,” also criticized the PSOE spokesperson and Minister of Education, Pilar Alegría. In reality, the Socialist Party has launched in a whirlwind throughout the week to denounce not only the pacts with Vox but also the assumption by the PP in the government agreements of a good part of the ultra agenda.

The repeal of specific measures on gender violence, of specific departments on sexist violence and even the elimination of the term to be renamed “domestic violence” are a constant in the pacts that are being finalized between PP and Vox. “The PP is going to accept political brutality against women. In all these cities the women’s helpline will no longer ring because they accept the denialism of sexist violence, ”said Gómez de Celis in his appearance.

Although the threat of setbacks in terms of equality is going to be strategic in the PSOE’s speech for July 23 (as already happened with the announced anti-abortion protocol of the Junta de Castilla y León) the idea is that the ideological battle is more broad and also occurs on fronts such as climate change, the economy or social advances. And the objective is, furthermore, to be able to contrast this social model deployed by the Executive of Pedro Sánchez with a single alternative, the one that has borne fruit in Valencia, to make the PP and Vox indistinguishable as two equally protagonist elements of the same political event: the reactionary right.

The President of the Government himself will also be fully employed in this strategy, who this Sunday will give the green light to the pre-campaign with an act in Dos Hermanas (Seville). Pedro Sánchez, who will alternate the weeks of the campaign with some of his obligations in the current presidency of the European Union, will strive to make the countdown to the generals something similar to a constant face-to-face with Alberto Núñez Feijóo.

The offer to multiply the electoral debates was already rejected by Genoa as an “eccentricity” of the president, although in Ferraz they continue to demand from the popular that Feijóo clarify how many debates he is willing to attend. They continue to think of the PSOE that, despite the wear and tear and mobilizing effects that the so-called “repeal of sanchismo” seems to have, according to the results of 28M, the president continues to add value to the options of the left, especially if they manage to close that hand-to-hand with the leader of the PP.

The Socialists know that it is difficult for their opponent, with the wind in their favor in the polls and with the interest that the campaign pass smoothly, to accept exposing himself in more than one face to face. And faced with this strategy that, ‘the less that happens, the better’, the PSOE has to take risks.

In the coming weeks it will become common to see the President of the Government in settings and communication formats that he has not frequented since he entered La Moncloa. He will start on Monday at Intermedio de La Sexta with Greater Wyoming, but he will not stay there and it is expected that he will go to media outlets with a conservative editorial line whose invitations he had so far declined.

They say in the PSOE that the interview with Zapatero this week in the COPE, vindicating the legacy of the socialists in matters such as the fight against the terrorism of ETA, served to a great extent to raise a touched morale and to leave a lesson: that dialectical battles must not be considered lost even in the most inhospitable scenarios.