- PP.Alberto Núñez Feijóo: "The Spaniards do not deserve a Government that does not tell them the number of deceased"
- PNV.Iñigo Urkullu: "We will not support Budgets that now raise taxes"
- PP + C. Carlos Iturgaiz: "I am the Popular Party of all life"
The cards are on the table in Galicia and the Basque Country. Socialists, popular , purple , orange and green face this Sunday elections marked by the coronavirus crisis in the midst of the outbreak of the pandemic. While Pedro Sánchez's PSOE faces its first examination after managing the disease, Pablo Casado's party faces the result obtained by its candidate for Lehendakari , Carlos Iturgaiz. Vox and Citizens hope to enter the Basque Chamber and United We can fear losing power.
PSOE, first examination after the pandemic
The Galician and Basque elections that take place this Sunday are unique in many ways: the first after confinement and the state of alarm, with the coronavirus still present and outbreaks throughout Spain. Despite the regional nature of the elections, the national reading will pass for the PSOE for being the first examination at the polls of Pedro Sánchez's management of the crisis, and also for being the first vote since the formation of the coalition government with United We Can .
On this second point, with Pablo Iglesias' party and its confluences on the downside, the Socialists have let the second vice-president make without great concern, for example, due to his constant calls for a tripartite with Bildu in the Basque Country. Nothing of what Iglesias has said, socialist sources explain, worries the least in this case, because the relationship with the PNV is absolutely "normalized" both in the Basque Country and at the national level.
The PSE is focused on improving its representation and reissuing the pact with the PNV. All the polls point to an increase in deputies and votes, which would allow them to gain strength in the Basque Government (they now occupy three councils) and reinforce the idea that the party is not suffering wear and tear from its management.
In the PSE, however, they admit that they do not know how the outbreaks will affect them, but that it is reasonable that they do not do it "in a special way", also taking into account that it is a Sunday in July.
In Galicia, the health situation has worsened in the last week in the region of La Mariña ( Lugo ), which has been confined. Although the Ministry of Health already allows to move between municipalities, with the exception of Burelo . The PSdG has come to ask that this area not vote.
The Galician socialists entrust themselves to these last hours to work the miracle that Alberto Núñez Feijóo does not achieve his fourth absolute majority. If it did not succeed, the alternative would be a sum with all the leftist and nationalist parties, at a time when the BNG was rising, which could be the second force, and the Podemos brand was declining. Pedro Sánchez has turned to these elections -except this Friday, who could not go due to a breakdown of his plane-, and if the result is not good, it will lead to interpretations of his management of the coronavirus.
PP, success and resignation
If there are two souls in the PP, those are the ones that will be in the fray this Sunday in the Galician and Basque regional elections. The most ideological wing, the one that follows the Aznarist path and that of "the essences" is personified in the Basque Country by Carlos Iturgaiz, candidate of a coalition ( PP + Cs ) with poor prospects. And that it is resigned to serve only as the flying goal of a much larger project, that of the "recasting" of the entire electoral space of the center and the right.
The other popular margin , that of the managerial and self-styled "moderate" profile, is represented in Galicia by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, a hegemonic regional leader (ista) for 11 years and a baron of barons , who aspires to reissue his absolute majority with Marianist encouragement .
So, with its many nuances and without the advantage of equidistance, this Sunday the PP looks at itself in its two mirrors: the concave and the convex. The one that returns a gigantic image, of winner, and the one that lights red alerts. If the forecasts are fulfilled, Feijóo will wipe out a different discourse from that of Genoa, and Iturgaiz, the bet of Pablo Casado, will consummate the fall in disgrace of the popular in the Basque Country.
The focus will turn in both cases, and immediately, towards the head of the opposition, but in his environment they believe that this is something that has already been discounted. "Everything depends on Galicia. The Basques are amortized in the national direction," they say in Genoa. But not entirely: the great fear of the popular is that Vox wins a seat for Álava.
The polls that the PP manages suggest that the PP + Cs coalition will win about five seats, the same ones that Alfonso Alonso predicted in January. That is, four less than in 2016 alone. There would be three for Álava, one in Vizcaya and the other in Guipúzcoa. "But the third from Álava can be taken away from us by Vox, even," says a popular Basque who believes that the "punishment" of the voter will be concentrated in this fishing ground.
"There are no nerves, we are already looking more at Monday, at the reconstruction of the Basque PP," he confesses. "The campaign has been done well, without fail, the party is mobilized and united," they emphasize in Genoa.
"And we see it very well in Galicia," they add. All that remains is to calibrate the abstention from the coronavirus outbreaks: "We are being asked to destroy ... and to destroy, every last citizen has to vote."
United We Can, fear of a flight of votes
In Podemos they have worked in recent days to ask for a "new opportunity" both in Galicia and in the Basque Country. To curb the possible disillusionment in these communities regarding the formation that the leakage of votes towards the PSOE and the nationalist parties confirms. The purple formation falls, according to the surveys, but not its "progressive" partners, as they define them. Therefore, it is not a fall from the left.
Faced with this situation, both Iglesias, as well as their candidates and the different leaders who have participated in the campaigns, have exhibited as a guarantee the so-called "social shield" that the Government has implemented in recent months. Social measures such as the minimum vital income, of which Podemos claims his paternity, to capture votes.
"Now some changes are taking place at the state level and I think we are no longer talking about promises, we are talking about verifiable facts," Iglesias said Friday in Durango ( Vizcaya ).
The moratorium on rents or mortgages and the ban on cutting basic supplies - water, electricity - are other arguments put forward by the purple leaders , turning the autonomous elections in Galicia and the Basque Country into a plebiscite on their political strength and the citizens' perception of their presence in the Government.
"I think it is honest to say that our presence made the way of dealing with the crisis different from how it was faced in the past," Iglesias boasted in La Coruña this week. Hence, a bad result could erode his power or ability to influence in Madrid.
In the party they assume that in recent years their electoral mass has been losing weight. Therefore, the purpose in recovering the defrauded. "I know that in the past our political force had immense support in the Basque Country, we won two general elections. They looked forward to the possibility of a change in the state and that many people later lost that hope," Iglesias said in Durango.
"The confluence in Galicia was the first force in several processes and then we stopped being it. A lot of people got fed up with us", was the self-criticism in La Coruña, where they asked for the vote to the "people who once supported United We can give us a new opportunity. Now the facts speak. " Her government action as a weapon to stop the flight to the PSOE, BNG or Bildu.
Vox, intensity with an uncertain result
Vox planned a very intense campaign in Galicia and the Basque Country, which would have national resonance and give prominence to the party, and it has succeeded. It started with a controversy with Correos, which decided to stop sending Vox electoral propaganda on its own and had to be rectified by the Electoral Board.
It continued with the aggression suffered at a Santiago Abascal rally in Sestao, in which the national deputy Rocío de Meer received a stone in the head, and has been extended to the end with interventions against "the ETA cubs", against "the nationalist "Alberto Núñez Feijóo and, in general, against what they call" progressive dictatorship ".
The result of all this will be known firstly tomorrow. Vox leaves with very little chance of entering the parliaments of Galicia and the Basque Country, according to data from the main surveys published by the media, but it is not impossible either. Above all, it has hopes of achieving a deputy in the Chamber of Vitoria for the province of Álava, the place where the seat is cheapest, which would be a success for the party and for its leader, forged in the Basque PP in the more years hard of the resistance before ETA (precisely, having Carlos Iturgaiz, current popular candidate and therefore Vox's main competitor among the conservative electorate) as head of the ranks .
The party, however, also does not rule out obtaining a seat in Galicia. He has it more difficult -the minimum percentage of votes to run for the seat is 5%, compared to 3% in the Basque Country-, but he hopes to arrive in La Coruña, where in the general elections of last November he got 8.2% of the votes. If he succeeded, it would be a double triumph: for making his debut in a new autonomous Parliament and for doing it against Feijóo, the main representative of the moderate and centrist PP, the "cowardly right" of Vox's speech.
At the national level, elections in principle can only benefit Vox. No major poll has given him seats in the parliaments at stake, so if he does not, he will not be considered a major failure, but if he does, he will be seen as a great success. The campaign has also contributed to the image of frontal opposition in all areas to the Pedro Sánchez government that it wants to consolidate.
Cs, entry into Vitoria
Ciudadanos presents itself in its two most hostile communities with the almost impossible objective of entering both parliaments. Cs has never been represented in these historical communities. Achieving it, even if it is with one seat in Galicia and two in the Basque Country -those are its objectives-, would be a historic success for Inés Arrimadas, who has just started her mandate with a strategic turn, having reached pacts with the Government of Pedro Sánchez.
The orange formation has it almost impossible in Galicia, where its candidate, Beatriz Pino , tries to climb a very difficult port to be a deputy for Pontevedra . But she is about to enter the Basque Parliament thanks to the excellent negotiation that she closed with the PP.
The PP + Cs coalition threatens to be a great fiasco: it can drop from nine seats to six or even five. However, even in the worst case, Cs would get the third deputy for Álava , and the second for Vizcaya if they get six.
Cs Euskadi is a very small formation, which has only had two councilors in its history. Now, however, the orange leadership understands that it can attract a focused constitutional vote, not very friendly to extremes, which can cushion the fall in votes of the PP alone.
Much more difficult is Galicia, where Alberto Núñez Feijóo threatens to monopolize the entire center-right vote. The Cs management estimates that it needs 26,000 votes to enter Parliament, less if the abstention is very high. On November 10, the day of the Cs debacle, he obtained 23,620 in Pontevedra, so they do not consider it impossible.
From the management, they assure that in rural areas, where the vote for the PP is massive, there is a lot of fear of the coronavirus and of voting on Sunday. With more weight of the urban vote, the oranges aspire to surprise.
- Information prepared by Marisol Hernández , Juanma Lamet , Raúl Piña , Roberto Benito and Luis Ángel Sanz .
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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