2023-07-16 07:00:00
When the president of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, was left lying on the canvas after being beaten by the regional elections on May 28, still stunned, he decided to get up and bring forward the elections for this coming July 23, in the middle of summer hottest hitherto known.
Today the sun is hot for everyone, including voters and politicians, and it is expected that voters will not come out en masse from the shade, nor from the beaches, to go to the polls next Sunday. More than 20 million Spaniards will be out of their homes on that date, although not all of them are over 18 years of age.
In the Autonomous Community of Andalusia, the most populous, it is prohibited by law to hold regional elections between July 1 and August 31, but the law does not mention the prohibition of general elections. Those who will have the worst time will be the jurors at the polling stations, forced to be at the polling stations for 12 hours and without air conditioning, since public schools do not have that privilege.
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Two characters lead the contest to preside over the Government. The first, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, fits the generic profile of a Galician former student of a Marist Brothers school. Sira, his mother, said that “Alberto married Galicia, but Galicia does not give me grandchildren.” He had his first and only child at the age of 55, he collects toy cars, has been a pilgrim on the Compostela road with bard and shell and is an expert in public health.
The leader of the Popular Party (PP), Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
He receives calls from Julio Iglesias, recovered the bankrupt national postal company and was twice president of the Xunts de Galicia from 2009 to 2022. If he wins, he would be the seventh Galician president of Spain, not counting the 40 years that Generalissimo Francisco Franco ruled .
He is 1.80, but looks short next to Sánchez, who is 1.90. For this reason, his team demanded in the face-to-face that took place this week in Spain that the candidates be seated. Faced with Sánchez, she has a disadvantage: he does not speak English, but he maintains an undefeated appeal for a politician: he has never lost an election.
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Sánchez, his contender, is from Madrid and was born on February 29. As a boy he danced break dance, he studied at the same school as Queen Letizia, played basketball, was a fan of Atlético de Madrid. He also speaks French and Portuguese, his dog is called Turca, and he overthrew President Mariano Rajoy from Congress. He is very Galician too, like Alberto.
The fate of the fourth largest economy in Europe, the Iberian oven, will be decided at more than 40° Celsius.
Pedro Sánchez, current president of the Spanish government.
Will Spain go to the right as the polls anticipate?
The Popular Party is not enough to obtain 176, the majority of the 350 seats in Parliament, and it would have to sleep with Vox, a kind of hidden concubine of Alberto Núñez, known simply as Feijóo, by his second surname.
Although the macroeconomic figures are sympathetic to the current PSOE government, when Spaniards go to buy oil, potatoes, sirloin, cooked chickpeas, beef, homemade soda, wine, hake and lentils, they lash out at Sánchez, and even worse when they pay for energy for air conditioning, heating, rent, transportation, clothing, or entertainment.
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The Government has managed to lower the prices of the kilowatt of energy and freeze the rents, but even so they are higher than a year ago.
What for the PSOE is a great advance in social reforms, such as the increase in the minimum wage, the control of inflation, the promise to end the crime of sedition, pardons, the legalization of euthanasia, the absolute rejection of violation of women’s rights to terminate pregnancy, the trans law, job creation; right-wingers vehemently reject it.
The polls show Feijóo as the winner.
In turn, Sanchismo assures that the popular program is intentionally ambiguous to fish for voters in a broader sector and that it intends to go back 20 years to Spain. That of the bullfighters, the tricorne, the scarf, the censorship, the phalanx or black Spain.
“Lies”. Feijóo continues to repeat the figures from which Sánchez puffs his chest and thus blurted it out several times in the only debate, which seemed like a dog fight between so many barks, bites and interruptions where neither of them understood what he wanted to express. Feijóo’s strategy and Sánchez’s lack of control, who seemed more like the challenger than the owner of the golden belt. The president bears the burden of proof.
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In the debate on Monday, Feijóo remained calm in his gaze and his body expressions were not uncomfortable. His strategy was to drop fragmentation bombs knowing that the field was not tilted in his favor. Not everyone sees the same debate, but the street, the media, the debaters and in the same awning of sanchismo, accept that it did not go very well for the president, who wanted to hold six debates, and in the hangover of the only debate that It was carried out on Mediaset, a private television channel, and not on TVE, the official channel, in the death throes of the campaign, the president lacks time to go to all possible means to look for the traceback of some polls that anticipate that he must move out of Moncloa and that he will not be able to continue flying every two days in the famous Falcon that fascinates him so much and criticizes him.
The president of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, suffers a serious setback in the municipal and regional elections.
Each candidate has their skeletons kept in the closet. Feijóo, some photos that reaffirm his friendship with Marcial Dorado Baúlde, a well-known former tobacco smuggler and Galician drug trafficker residing on the island of Arosa y Sánchez, and his relationship with Francisco Javier Gastelu, alias Txapote, former leader of the terrorist group ETA and syndicated of various murders.
“Que te vote Txapote”, the catchy slogan, written in capital letters on a homemade banner, raised in Seville in September by a middle-aged man in a short-sleeved white shirt, blowing a green whistle, has become the lethal kryptonite that takes away the powers of President Sánchez and that the popular use on billboards and t-shirts, knowing the hatred that the terrorist group ETA generates in the Spanish.
Feijóo is rubbed that surely, if he does not achieve an absolute majority in the Congress of Deputies, he will make an alliance with Vox
Feijóo is rubbed that surely, if he does not achieve an absolute majority in the Congress of Deputies, he will make an alliance with Vox, the right-wing party led by Santiago Abascal Conde, whose ideas make the Galician look reddish and intends, among other things, to End the Ministry of Equality, abandon climate agreements, courts for violence against women, a naval blockade to prevent the entry of small boats, aggravate the crime of embezzlement, the authority of parents to authorize any affective sexual content in the schools, the expulsion of illegals under the umbrella of protecting Spain, the family and the State. Feijóo denies his affair with Vox and denies them, convinced that he does not need that alliance. Sanchismo assures that Feijóo would govern with “voxadas”.
(Also: Who is Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the man behind the triumph of the PP in Spain?)
On the other hand, despite the perks granted by being the pilot of the official machinery, his recent visit to Joe Biden in the White House, serving as temporary president of the European Union, being an active member of NATO and the economy figures; The defeat of the arrogant, flirtatious and telegenic Pedro Sánchez, according to all known polls, seems inevitable.
Vox campaign in Spain.
Feijóo, from Peares, Ourense, Galicia, where he was born and lived until he was 14 years old, the most complex town in Spain, which has three rivers and belongs to two provinces and four municipalities, has all the earmarks of being elected as the new president of Spain, on July 23, the month in which the Spanish go on holiday with their children, mother-in-law, grandmother and dog, and they are not even there to watch television, as demonstrated in what seemed to be the most watched debate, but turned out to be the least watched , because at this time neither the cows wag their tails nor do you watch television and it is not known if the families will decide to leave the summer beach bar where they drink beer to go to the polls in flip-flops.
FERNAN MARTINEZ MAHECHA
FOR THE TIME
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