Francisco Toscano leaves the mayor's office of Dos Hermanas after achieving 10 absolute majorities

Francisco Toscano, 72, leaves the mayor's office of Dos Hermanas this Thursday, the second most populous city in the province of Seville (around 135,000 inhabitants) with an electoral card that few can match: 10 elections since 1983 and 10 absolute majorities.

Affiliated with the PSOE since 1979, Toscano resigns a little less than a year and a half before the municipal elections of 2023 to prepare a replacement in the Nazarene City Council that allows him to continue the path of victories inaugurated by him.

Basilia Sanz, number two on the list and his wife, will replace him on an interim basis, but the next mayor will be Francisco Rodríguez García, 51, deputy mayor, general secretary of the Dos Hermanas socialist group and the man who was behind and next to Juan Espadas in his race in the PSOE primaries for the candidacy for the presidency of the Board.

As mayor, Quico Toscano leaves a city, located at the foot of the Seville-Cádiz motorway, which has changed its skin since he became mayor: he has provided it with services, industries, industrial estates, housing, hence his social recognition and its collection of absolute majorities. It also leaves more than a hundred roundabouts in the city that drive outsiders crazy. “They are a way of living together. The traffic light regulates by giving orders, the roundabout is more courteous, the right-of-way is yielded”, the mayor explained to this newspaper. Before entering politics, Toscano, a Law graduate from the University of Seville, worked as a lawyer at the labor law firm on Calle Capitán Vigueras in Seville, where Felipe González, Rafael Escuredo and Manuel del Valle work.

Toscano is also famous for being a good manager —he is one of those who has applied the maxim that a City Council cannot spend more than it earns—, for knowing how to make teams and a quarry. They say that every day he has breakfast in a bar near the Town Hall with his councilors, they chat, contrast and engage in politics.

But in addition to being mayor, Toscano has been a very influential person in the PSOE, but without ever claiming a flashy position for himself. In the previous socialist federal executive he was elected president of the federal committee, a position of recognition, but without any executive power. He has exercised national politics since Dos Hermanas. He has always been on the side of renewal in his party. In the 90s, he opted for the renovators against the war fighters; by Josep Borrell instead of Joaquín Almunia; by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero instead of José Bono; by Pedro Sánchez instead of Susana Díaz; and he was a key player in the battle in the Andalusian primaries when he bet clearly and decisively on Juan Espadas.

Toscano was one of the main supports that today's Prime Minister had in his two primary elections.

When he resigned as general secretary in the bloody federal committee held on October 1, 2016, Toscano was one of the first to ask him not to throw in the towel definitively and to present himself to another internal race in which he had the entire apparatus and the historical leaders against.

It was in Dos Hermanas where Sánchez, urged among others by Toscano, announced his return.

And he resoundingly won over the then president of the Board.

Dos Hermanas was also approached in December 2020 by Susana Díaz to ask Toscano for advice on the changes in the Andalusian PSOE.

Toscano, who speaks slowly and is a great conversationalist, ventured over a long lunch what was going to happen and tried, as almost always, an agreed relief that the former president rejected because she interpreted it as a ucase.

Thanks to Toscano's proposal, deceased Andalusian and Nazarene councilors, councilors with at least two mandates in the Andalusian Government and the drafters of the first Statute of Autonomy for Andalusia will have a street in the extensive urbanization of Entrenúcleos, a brutal urban operation where it is The construction of more than 20,000 homes is planned.