• Direct General Elections 23-J, last minute
  • 'Tracking' The last poll before 23-J: Feijóo achieves his best result, Sánchez stagnates and Vox sinks
  • 23-J Vox's electoral program for the 2023 elections

In the calendar of Vox the electoral debate of this Wednesday is marked as the most important appointment in the final week of the campaign. Santiago Abascal attends the meeting to three convinced that the absence of Alberto Núñez Feijóo will allow him to take control of the discourse of the right against Pedro Sánchez and Yolanda Díaz and, as a consequence, stop the transfer of vote to the Popular Party that both Vox and most demoscopic companies are detecting in recent days.

In Vox the idea of not attending the RTVE debate between the leaders of the four main parties in the country was never on the table and they recognize that the role played by Abascal in the meeting can "change" the dynamics of the polls. Feijóo, first in the polls and with the favorable wind, rules out participating to avoid the long-awaited photograph with Abascal that the left seeks to denounce the embrace between the PP and Vox. In Genoa they believe that the popular president made a great face-to-face last week and that he must now bet on his own agenda. That does not gain anything by going to a debate, say sources of the apparatus, in which the rest of the participants will charge directly against the one who has more options to triumph on Sunday.

But this strategy leaves the space to the right of the PSOE totally clear for Abascal, who will lash out during the debate especially against Pedro Sánchez for embodying one by one all the policies that Vox promises to repeal if he reaches La Moncloa. Abascal will run as the true "alternative" and will harshly confront the president of the Government to profile himself as a leader frontally opposed to Sanchismo and without half measures with socialism, in contrast to the agreement that Feijóo proposed to the socialist leader in the face to face to agree that both let the most voted list govern.

This, they believe in Vox, will serve as a push in the final stretch of the campaign. Questioned about whether the debate comes very late – just three days before election day – in Bamboo they respond that quite the opposite, that it comes at the ideal time to finish a campaign of its own profile and distance with all the parties. And they pull newspaper library to justify their argument: in November 2019, the last national campaign, Vox managed to mobilize more than half a million votes after the debate to five. Of those protagonists – Pedro Sánchez, Pablo Casado, Albert Rivera, Pablo Iglesias and Santiago Abascal – only Sánchez and Abascal remain in the political front line.

Debate to seven

In fact, and despite the fact that the polls affect the downward trend, the leadership of the party trusts that in recent days there has been a change in dynamics precisely as a result of another debate: the one held at seven also in RTVE, in which Iván Espinosa de los Monteros participated and, as they defend in the ranks of the party, "ate" Cuca Gamarra, secretary general of the PP, especially in economic matters.

So Vox plays with the revulsive of the debate as the last bullet to turn the polls, in free fall for the party since the campaign started. The passage of Feijóo by El Hormiguero – which humanized his figure – and the face to face – in which he dismantled the policies of Sánchez and made the president lose his nerves – deepened the open wound against Vox, to which in recent days the popular leader has added the defense of the useful vote against the unknown of whether Abascal will achieve representation in distinguished territories for Vox, such as Castilla y León or Extremadura.

The accounts in Vox are very different: the party defends that in a dozen provinces they are the ones who are a few votes away from snatching seats from the PSOE, so the real useful vote in numerous constituencies, the one that ensures an electoral overturn for the right, resides in the Vox ballot.

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