The plebiscite at the municipal ballot box

Citizen emotion will be expressed today through the ballot box. Tonight we will know how loud the bell of a change of political cycle in Spain sounds. "There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come," Victor Hugo wrote. It will be the first elections in the whole country after a deadly pandemic in which we suffered the harshest lockdown in the world; the incorporation of radicalisms contrary to the Constitution into the direction of the State; d

and pardons for independentists and the repeal of sedition; of the

and the Trans Act;

.

The national reading of the results as the first round for the general elections will be pertinent and inevitable: all parties have assumed their plebiscitary character. The general count of the vote in the municipal elections will again be an advance that suggests or slides the background currents that will later be consolidated in the general elections, although it does not necessarily predetermine their results. This is because

, and not a few will be able to leave national arguments, however important, to focus on their specific local or regional keys.

The transformation of cities and the management of the autonomous communities responds, obviously, to ideological approaches or differentiated models, but, due to the more tangible nature of these policies,

. And the mere fact of occupying the Mayor's Office or the regional presidency is usually an advantage in itself.

Aware of this, and of the profile of respectability retained by most of the municipal and regional leaders of the PSOE,

It has accepted the plebiscite to instrumentalize the presumed resilience of those as apparent proof of its own.

. He thus tries to settle accounts with his trajectory of uninhibited lies, institutional voracity, strategic polarization and reckless alliances: an eventual favorable result would be presented as a validation, which would cleanly open the doors of his immediate future as president of the EU, and as a launching pad towards re-election.

The campaign thus posed has been a disaster and a failure I would point out.

and confidence in government action. The decision of Bildu to include terrorists in its lists, seven of them with blood crimes, placed in its dimension of democratic ethics the delivery of Sánchez to the structural bloc with the heirs of ETA and placed a moral baldon on the socialist candidates, with the president reaffirming himself in Congress, being subject to those pacts effectively to citizen scrutiny. And, finally, the succession of scandals of the last week, from the purchase of votes in Mojácar to the kidnapping of Maracena, offers a symptom of the decline of the party that will have consequences especially in Andalusia.

For

, the elections are an opportunity to consolidate his leadership and to give credibility to the outside world the cautious optimism with which he faces the rivalry towards the generals. The PP will grow today and expand its territorial power – the question is how much.

: the voter identifies him, therefore, as the one who can best respond to the impulse of centrality and reformism. A triumph should be followed by the presentation of an identifiable and coherent project with a model of society and an idea of Spain.

The immediate challenge would also be to define the relationship with Vox, which will also improve its representation and

. The limits are marked by constitutional modernity, the vocation of moderation and large majorities and the proscription of the dynamics of frentism that characterize the agreements of Sánchez with his radical partners. The party of

it will have to decide whether it accepts being the conservative force that complements the PP with respect to certain symbolic and emotional elements of the right or gives free rein to the anti-political and anti-institutional inclinations that also nest within it.

after having whitewashed the unpresentable candidacies of Bildu.

The question is what is meant by a victory today. The number of total votes, with its translation into councilors and regional deputies, should be a sufficient fact, and of course it is the one that will reflect the trend and sensitivity of the country, but the alliances of the PSOE can allow it to retain by a handful of votes, a whole

, important regional governments and provincial capitals. In large part,

, which moves on the limit of falling into total irrelevance or deciding for a few tenths as important as the Valencian Community. One result or another will mark the future negotiation with Sumar to recompose the map on the left.

The PP will undoubtedly maintain Murcia and Madrid, in this case with a majestic majority that will catapult

as a great

national, and also comfortably the capital of Spain. Take La Rioja for granted and see Aragon, the Balearic Islands and Cantabria very close. It also caresses the Valencian Community,

: no poll dares to assure which side the ball will fall on this

, but what they all agree on is that

leads by at least five points to

. Genoa does not rule out Castilla-La Mancha or make full in the eight Andalusian capitals, also in Seville. It can be all that or it can be almost nothing by a thread of popular will.

The success of Moncloa is in having created a framework that is that everything that is not a total disaster will leave a margin to be sold as a triumph. But it will do you no good to deceive yourself:

and failures, thanks to him. The citizen emotion is in the centrality. The municipal ballot boxes are the measure and will dictate sentence.