• MIGUEL RIAÑO

    @miguel_riano

    Madrid

Updated Monday,29May2023-21:32

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  • Live 28-M: latest news, live
  • Elections Results of the municipal and regional elections 2023
  • Politics Pedro Sánchez liquidates the Government after the debacle of the PSOE on 28-M and calls general elections on July 23

Pedro Sánchez faced a plebiscite this Sunday, lost it and now has decided to call another to save himself. A double or nothing definitive that contains a paradox: to stay alive after 23-J, the PSOE would have to repeat the same results that this 28-M left the president of the Government in a political coma. An analysis of the scrutiny allows us to interpret that the PSOE does not sink, that the space to its left practically disappears, that the right does not add enough – the aggregate of PP and Vox closed the night at 38.7% municipal – and that the pacts with ERC or EH Bildu that have weighed down Sánchez's project would continue to be his only option to stay in power. All that is true and false at the same time, because the map of this Sunday was radically distorted by Andalusia, Castilla-La Mancha or Castilla y León.

The Popular Party will govern from the coming weeks in Seville, Malaga, Granada, Cordoba, Almeria, Huelva and Cadiz. All capitals except Jaén, five of them with an absolute majority. Even so, the PP remained at 38% in the Andalusian municipal total, less than five points above the PSOE, with a left that practically tied the overall result of the conservative bloc. The strength of the socialist mayors who still maintain power in medium or small municipalities saved the furniture for the PSOE, but that effect has long since vanished when voting in a political key and not in a personal key, as in the town halls.

Less than a year ago, when Juanma Moreno called the regional polls, what made clear the result was not only his absolute majority, but the transformation of Andalusia, historic socialist mattress, into the new granary of the Popular Party. The community that distributes more deputies in the general elections, 61, is now a fiefdom of the PP where the right received 60% of the vote in 2022, well above the 46.2% that PP and Vox added on the night of 28-M.

With Sunday's results, Andalusia would have distributed 31 deputies for the PP, 25 for the PSOE, 3 for the left of Podemos and Sumar, and only 2 for Vox.

With last year's regional results, that distribution would change to 34 for the PP, 18 for the PSOE, 6 for Vox and 3 for Podemos/Sumar. A total overturn of 14 deputies – 7 that wins the right, 7 that loses the PSOE – that calls into question the forecasting power of the municipal ones to which Sánchez trusts his survival in less than two months. If Sanchez aspires to replicate the numbers of this Sunday, he cheats the solitaire.

If the Congress of Deputies were simulated taking into account the count of 28-M, the PP of Alberto Núñez Feijóo would achieve 139 seats, by 120 of a PSOE that brings together representatives in small provinces, where the candidates of Podemos and Vox, without structure or territorial implantation, fail to compete. Santiago Abascal's party narrowly exceeded 7% of the municipal vote, when the average of national polls predicts it more than double. In that simulated Congress Vox would only achieve 17 deputies, an unthinkable scenario.

And the most recent results have made it clear that the regional ones have more capacity to predict the general results than the municipal ones. In December 2018, Juanma Moreno achieved 20.75%. In November 2019, Pablo Casado almost traced it with 20.78% support. That same year, the PSOE won 36.91% in the municipal elections of May, three and two points above the two general elections of that cycle.

The problems to transfer the results of 28-M to the projections of 23-J force us to look in the same way towards Castilla-La Mancha. It is not only that the only socialist baron who maintains an absolute majority is Emiliano García-Page, the most critical of Pedro Sánchez, but that he wins with votes borrowed from the center-right. On Sunday, the PSOE won the Castilian-La Mancha regional elections with 45.06% of the vote, and the left reached 49.2% total, adding the result of Podemos. In the general elections four years ago, in a context of global defeat of the right, PP, Vox and Ciudadanos already added in the region more than 56%, eight points above the 47.5% of this 28-M.

Comparison of seats between PSOE and PP in the last regional elections.

The fall of the right when the elections change from general to regional is absorbed by Page, but precedents say that Sánchez would not. If the 28-M distributed the 21 seats in La Mancha for Congress, the PSOE would stay 12 and the right 9. Exactly the opposite of the two general elections of 2019. Three less, which would push the PSOE below 110 seats, assuming that Pedro Sánchez, as headliner, was able to consolidate the result of the PSOE this Sunday throughout the rest of Spain.

On that expectation also weighs as unknown Castilla y León, which distributes another 31 seats for Congress, and where the right usually performs worse in municipal elections. This Sunday the sum of PP, Vox and Citizens remained at 49%, while in the regional elections last year it exceeded 53.5%, and in the two general elections of 2019 it swept with 57.5% in April and 56.4% in November. Despite these burdens, and with a Citizens that still retains 300,000 voters, the PP managed to win this Sunday the PSOE by 757,727 votes throughout Spain.

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