A disastrous debate for Sánchez and the socialists

PP leader Feijóo successfully framed himself as a grown up Prime Minister.

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Forget about the data points and the policies that Sánchez and Feijóo mentioned in their only election debate on Antena 3 last night. It was not about that. It was all about rhetoric, emotion and reactions. Contempt, anxiety, nervousness and anger, even aggressiveness, affected the Prime Minister. He continuously interrupted Feijóo, but in an unauthoritative, irritating manner; he ignored the moderators (who were useless throughout); and he was unable to avoid the expression of those emotions on his face. In terms of rhetoric, the candidates’ presence and the staging, there was a reversal of the formal roles. Feijóo managed to frame himself as more prime ministerial, the grown up who at least knows how to control himself, and Sánchez, as many newspaper columns rightly point out this morning, looked more like the candidate than a sitting PM, petulant and desperate.

Sánchez threw away a month of media work to frame him as a closer, more likeable bloke in radio and TV interviews after the poor results at the local and regional elections in May and probably ruined his chances of spending another parliament in the Spanish PM’s office in Moncloa. What we saw last night could not have been a conscientious communication strategy, given the outcome of the night and the results. It's hard to believe any media or communications guru would have advised him to do that. Sánchez couldn’t control himself and, especially in the first half of the debate, got caught up in a downward spiral of negative reactions, and Feijóo seemed to enjoy pushing him further and further in as each minute passed. The conservative leader seemed only moments away from causing a more susbstantial meltdown from the PM live in front of millions of viewers.

To make matters worse, Sánchez himself brought up some of the opposition’s favourite frames: the controversial "Txapote can vote for you" slogan (that links him rhetorically to Basque separatists and ETA) and his use of the official Falcón aircraft to fly around the country. How could Feijóo answer a question about the continuity of Sánchez's policy with Morocco, he replied sarcastically at the end, if the PM still hasn’t told the country what he did and what that policy was? Not even El País has managed put a positive spin on the debate for Sánchez this morning. Given such a result, should Feijóo have accepted the other five debates that Sánchez suggested at the beginning of June, or is such a one-match victory that much more impressive and overwhelming? Sánchez is now relegated to the "kids table” debate on July 19, with Vox and Sumar. The PSOE had clawed back a few points in the polls, heading back up to 30%, but we should now expect that red line to start going back down again and the blue line to continue to rise.