Not clear Sánchez will lose July election
PM challenges conservative leader Feijóo to SIX head-to-head election debates
Podemos and Ciudadanos fooled millions of voters over the past 10 years into thinking that they were going to revolutionise and fix the old Spanish political system after all the years of economic suffering caused by the financial crisis in 2008. Podemos scooped up all of that anger on the left and gave hope to millions of young people staring at ruined futures with an attitude that suggested they would break whatever needed to be broken in order to fix the situation. Ciudadanos promised to innovate its way through the mess in a more constructive, liberal, entrepreneurial manner. The revolution didn’t happen.
Ten years later, Iglesias is out, Rivera is out, Arrimadas is out, Garzón is out and the hopes and dreams of millions of voters have ended up in both cases in internal ideological bickering and jostling for seats and minor slices of personal power. Ciudadanos has gone to zero and won’t run at this general election. Podemos must decide by this Friday night if it is going to fold into Yolanda Díaz’s new Sumar coalition or try to remain independent. Some polls suggest that if what’s left of the party goes it alone, the left as a whole would likely lose power to a conservative-far-right PP-Vox coalition for the next four years. Others are already forecasting total disaster for the left.
The 40db poll in El País this morning says that the left and regionalists might just be able to hold on to power in July if Podemos joins Sumar. Heaven knows what such a weakend coalition beast might exact in terms of regionalist-nationalist demands and how much polarising nitroglycerine that would sprinkle on an even more enraged right. If they don’t run together, the poll gives a one-seat victory to the PP-Vox coalition. A Sociométrica poll in El Español yesterday gave the right a broader overall majority of 187 seats in total between them, which would be a majority of 11 against the left; a GESOP poll in El Periódico de España gives the right between 168 and 177 seats, also suggesting Sánchez and a new coalition might be able to hang on to power; an NC Report poll in La Razón returned between 184 and 188 seats for the PP and Vox together, a majority in either case; and a Data10 poll in OK Diario gives the conservatives and the far-right a clear lead with 188 seats in total.
The momentum is now with the right, then, so their voters will be more enthusiastic about turning out to cast ballots in July, excited about the possibility of ousting Sánchez and his, from their perspective, “anti-Spanish” coalition from government six months earlier than everyone had been expecting. The El Español poll, though, suggested voters prefer Sánchez (54%) as a leader personally to Feijóo (46%). The PM this morning appears to have given credence to that idea, suggesting a total of six additional debates, one each Monday through to the elections, starting next week, just between him and Feijóo, one-on-one, without the participation of the smaller parties. “The choice is not Sánchez or Spain”, the PM tweeted, “the 60% of voters who did not choose Vox or the PP are not anti-Spanish”.
There is so far no reply from Feijóo on that idea. If he doesn’t accept the challenge, he will seem weak and cowardly. Sumar and Vox have both rejected it. “Whoever believes that the future of Spain can be summed up in a photo of Pedro Sánchez and Feijóo is not connected to the reality of our country”, tweeted Yolanda Díaz: “the two-party system is a thing of the past”. “Spain has changed”, Santiago Abascal said: “there are millions of Spaniards who votes for other political forces”. The Vox leader was in Budapest on Friday with Viktor Orban, promising a far-right wave was about to sweep into European politics, and he described the Hungarian leader as “a fighter for freedom and a leader who has managed to rescue Hungary from communism and take her down the path of freedom and sovereignty”.
Pedro Sánchez said last week that he believes the right in Spain is copying Trump’s tactics in the US, Orban’s in Hungary or Bolsonaro’s in Brazil: “Spain is not immune to that reactionary wave but Spain can stop it”. The Guardian wrote that “recent elections in Italy, Sweden and Finland indicate that authoritarian nationalists, intent on whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment, waging culture wars and rolling back rights for women and minorities, are becoming a feature, not a glitch, in western European polities”.
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As I said before.
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