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Andalusia will once again play a crucial role in the municipal elections of May 28 due to the weight of its population in the country as a whole (61 of the 350 deputies of the Congress are decided on Andalusian soil) and because it was in the regional elections of 2022 where the PP could smell for the first time the aroma of a supposed change of cycle that brought Alberto Núñez Feijóo closer to La Moncloa.

But as important as making a good campaign – and both the PP and the PSOE of Pedro Sánchez and his entire Government are already in it – is to manage expectations intelligently. And the popular Andalusians have been trying to temper the heat of euphoria for a few weeks so as not to err in the calculations.

The question asked in both Ferraz and Genoa – and in their respective regional headquarters of San Vicente and San Fernando – is whether or not the Andalusian elections marked a ceiling of the Juanma Moreno effect, if the Andalusian baron will burst the forecasts in his favor or if the territorial power that the PSOE continues to have in Andalusia somehow manages to stop the blue tide. , either by merit of their mayors and candidates or because, in some way, the management of the Board has already generated some kind of wear and tear on the popular brand.

The uncertainty about the political landscape that will leave the scrutiny of 28-M extends with its regional peculiarities to the rest of corners of Spain 50 days before the new appointment with the polls. In 2019, the Socialists achieved for the first time that their party was the majority in the municipal sphere (6,657,119 votes) against a PP (5,058,542) weighed down then by corruption and stalked by a thriving Citizens (1,876,906), while Vox (659,736) was still a newcomer to parliamentarism.

The PSOE also managed to conquer three regional governments – Navarra, the Canary Islands and La Rioja – and maintain the six that it already presided over – Aragon, Asturias, the Balearic Islands, Castilla-La Mancha, the Valencian Community and Extremadura – in most cases supported by Podemos and its coalitions. To the resistance of these partners they now trust in Ferraz the maintenance of the electoral flow achieved four years ago since, despite their sonorous disagreements with the purples in La Moncloa, they believe that their brand is still "strong" and even "on the rise", as in Catalonia.

In the Socialist Federal Executive they do not contemplate that in Andalusia there may be a translation to the municipal elections of the autonomous vote of June last year, when they suffered an unprecedented debacle, despite the fact that at the beginning of this year their acronyms continued to deteriorate due to the concessions of the Government of Pedro Sánchez to the separatists of the procés, the internal tensions with Podemos or the legal errors of the law of only yes is yes while the Andalusian PP seemed then risen in an unstoppable wave. The secretary general of the PSOE-A, Juan Espadas, openly lamented the difficulty he found to place an alternative message to the official argument of the Board.

But, in the last month, for the first time, the opposition has marked the political agenda and has forced the Andalusian Government to defend itself again and again against those who accuse it of privatizing public health or point to the collapse of services as a failure of management despite the incontestable increase in investment. Have the tables turned? It is still too early to answer this question.

In an interview with EL MUNDO, the secretary general of the Andalusian PP, Antonio Repullo, pointed last Thursday to the weakness of the leader of the Andalusian Socialists and put as proof of this the landing in Andalusia of several members of the Council of Ministers to shore up the opposition work of Juan Espadas. "The ministers have to come and do their job." And so it is. Sánchez is aware that the PSOE is playing in Andalusia and has increased the pressure by increasing the presence of his Executive in the community and especially in Seville, which he has recently graced with its designation as the headquarters of the future Spanish Space Agency.

Pedro Sánchez, in Málaga.J. ZAPATAEFE

It is true that, in parallel, the Government has screwed up clamorously in Granada, despising its candidacy to host the Spanish Agency for the Supervision of Artificial Intelligence in favor of La Coruña, which forces us to think that for Ferraz losing Granada would be a lesser evil in terms of electoral calculation, while Seville is a strategic objective.

Granada, governed since 2021 by the socialist Francisco Cuenca after a convulsive legislature and after the rupture of the PP-Cs pact, is one of the conquerable places for the popular. In fact, Moreno has placed as a candidate one of the heavyweights of his team, the former Minister of Development Marifrán Carazo, whose campaign launched with honors from a Governing Council transferred expressly to Sierra Nevada.

Until the beginning of 2023, the polls predicted an incontestable success of the Andalusian PP that left it one step away from achieving the full eight in the capitals that it only achieved in 1995. That victory was the prelude to the triumph of José María Aznar in 1996. And the PP is convinced that, if the same scenario were to occur again, the consequence would be similar.

The survey of the Center for Andalusian Studies (Centra), dependent on the Board, pointed on January 30 to a triumph of the PP in the eight capitals, although in both Seville and Cádiz the victory does not guarantee that it can govern. It is very significant how almost all the published surveys speak of a situation of technical tie in Seville capital, including the one prepared by Sigma Dos for EL MUNDO in February.

Sevilla could become the court in which a kind of match point (match ball) will be resolved on May 28. Curiously, the popular candidate for the Andalusian capital, José Luis Sanz, former mayor Tomares, is the only one who has not directly appointed Moreno, since it was an imposition of Genoa in the times of Pablo Casado. But today the PP of Seville, after many internal battles that bled it electorally, rows again in a single direction and is not willing to surrender the square without fighting it.

For the PSOE, in turn, surrendering Seville would be to verify the absolute failure of the operation that Sánchez activated to definitively remove Susana Díaz from control of the party. Losing the mayor's office, today in the hands of the socialist Antonio Muñoz, would be a personal failure of the president.

In Catalonia, the second breadbasket of votes for the Socialists in the municipalities, the latest barometer of the Center for Opinion Studies of the Generalitat places them as the majority force for the general elections for the first time since 2008. To this data they cling in Ferraz to trust that, once "the independence soufflé has gone down" due, among other factors, to the concessions of Sánchez to those condemned by the procés, they will vote in the key of "the things of eating" and even trust that their candidate for Mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, can recover a place that they have not controlled since 2011.

In general terms, the PSOE has raised the campaign to try to preserve its leadership of four years ago and extend it – in the face of the attempt to overturn the PP – with a multiplication of acts not necessarily populous – only last week 182 were convened. From this strategy initiated in September they extract the analysis that they also have possibilities of placing their current deputy mayor of Valencia, Sandra Gómez, ahead of Compromís in the City Council of the capital of the Turia and that the popularJosé Luis Martínez-Almeida is "a vulnerable candidate" in Madrid who can take "a scare" if all the options of the left "do it well".

Beyond the concrete result in each territory, the next municipal elections in Andalusia will also serve as a thermometer on the eve of the general elections in December and will also allow the parties to take positions. If Juanma Moreno manages to show that he is still in a state of grace, his internal influence will grow as would his options in the line of succession of Feijóo, if the Galician leader does not achieve his goal of reaching La Moncloa. Because that too will be decided on 28 May, even if nobody wants to talk about it.

  • PP
  • PSOE
  • Seville
  • Pedro Sanchez
  • Citizenry
  • Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla
  • Compromís
  • Vox
  • Alberto Núñez Feijóo
  • Juan Espadas
  • Council of Ministers
  • Grenade
  • Can

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