2023-05-19 21:08:33
The campaign reaches the equator with hardly any movements. Neither big twists nor landslides in the surveys, according to various experts consulted. And that, that nothing happens, is not good news for the PSOE, which is the one who needs to turn those polls around and who has the most to lose, because their 2019 result was extraordinary and they have many more places to defend. The PP has achieved, with the Bildu case, an unexpected role that it did not have in the pre-campaign, when the agenda was controlled by Pedro Sánchez with his announcements and the debate revolved around the housing law or the credits for the entry of a flat for Young.
That is why now many, both in the PSOE and in the PP and other parties, are waiting for Sánchez to pull a rabbit out of the hat this weekend, this Saturday when he has the central act in the Valencian Community, the jewel in the crown, or on Sunday, to try to change this deadly campaign atmosphere. Sánchez has prepared announcements both on Saturday and Sunday, say socialist sources, but it is to be seen if he will have the capacity to revitalize a campaign that has started in a very different way from that expected by the socialists because, as always happens in these frenetic weeks, of something that was not in the plans: the Bildu case.
The PP has managed to change the campaign but it has also assumed a great risk, and this Friday it exploded in its hands: seeing Isabel Díaz Ayuso, a great reference for the Spanish right, openly confronting the president of Covite, Consuelo Ordóñez, who was precisely who uncovered the presence of ex-terrorists on the Bildu lists, is a hellish scenario for the strategists of Genoa street.
On Tuesday, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, accused Sánchez of being “more generous with the executioners than with the victims.” But the one who comes face to face with the victims is Ayuso, who went so far as to say of Consuelo Ordóñez, Gregorio’s sister, a true PP martyr, assassinated by ETA in 1995 while eating with María San Gil, who saw how he fell on the table shot in the neck, who “has had personal problems with the PP for years.” It was Covite, with his surveillance of the lists and of the names that he knows because they are the murderers of the relatives of the victims that compose it, the one who warned that there were terrorists in the Bildu candidacies. Ordóñez has no political affiliation, she is dedicated to the victims and their rights, like other associations, but she is implacable when she understands that someone is using her pain politically.
Ayuso’s excess reminds the PP of the historical division between the sector of Jaime Mayor Oreja, who always insisted that ETA was still very much supported by a very favorable conservative media environment, and that of the Basque PP, with leaders like Borja Sémper who said that Democracy had triumphed and in 2011, shortly after the announcement of the definitive truce, he wrote an article to his parents, which he titled “Don’t let them steal this moment from you” claiming that victory against ETA.
The problem is that now Feijóo has taken the case Collect as a flag -even this Friday at the Ferrol rally he continued to bring it out- and there it is no longer easy to make distinctions between moderate PP and hard PP. Everything has gone into the same bag and the Socialists trust that these excesses serve to mobilize their electorate, something that has happened on other occasions when the PP tried to use the victims and the pain that ETA left against the PSOE. Even so, Feijóo already took out the Collect theme in Ferrol almost routinely, without much enthusiasm, perhaps aware that little by little he is running out of his journey.
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The campaign has returned to the past and that has given more weight to two former presidents who had their leading role this Friday. The socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who suffered harsh disqualifications from the PP and up to eight demonstrations with Mariano Rajoy at the helm for his dialogue with ETA, which finally and after several failures ended with the definitive truce just as his mandate ended, in October 2011 , was devastated by the current debate. “We fought together against ETA, we suffered together against ETA, we managed to defeat ETA together, and I don’t understand why we can’t have a reasonable shared satisfaction”, he lamented. But, above all, Zapatero, like other politicians of the time who suffered through the hard years of terrorism and know of other international cases in which States have had to give up a lot to put an end to armed groups, does not understand why Spain does not boast of one of their greatest successes as a country. Zapatero recalled that international organizations “always set Spain as an example for how a victory was achieved against a terrorist group without giving up anything, without modifying any law, without granting any pardon and without approaching anything resembling an amnesty”.
On the contrary, José María Aznar, the president before Zapatero, who also negotiated with ETA to try to put an end to the gang, followed Ayuso’s line and maintained that Sánchez “needs Bildu, Sortu, Batasuna, ETA, whatever you want to call it ” to rule. The PP is looking for a huge mobilization of the right against Sánchez and a concentration of the vote in his party to minimize support for Vox, and this explains, according to several leaders, why Feijóo and Ayuso have raised the bar. Aznar, who always reappears in the campaign, is willing to raise it even more and asked the right to mobilize against Sánchez and vote for the PP because otherwise “Spain would enter a process of constitutional deconstruction.”
In such a strange campaign, dominated for more than a week by the Bildu case, the smaller groups have a hard time making themselves seen. In fact, one of the things that the PP is achieving with its excesses is that Vox appears much less. Podemos, whose survival is at stake in several autonomies and municipalities that have this complex barrier of 5%, needs to stand out. And this Friday they found a way to do it the hard way: with a giant banner in Madrid, in the central and conservative Goya street, with the face of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s brother, Tomás, and a phrase from Pablo Casado himself a few days before his dismissal: “The question is whether it is understandable that on April 1, when 700 people died in Spain, you can contract with your sister and receive 286,000 euros of profit for selling masks.” The latest polls say that Podemos will finally be able to enter Madrid and the Valencian Community. For the progressive bloc it is essential that this happen. For now, they have achieved the sought-after role.
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