The electoral campaign occupies everything

2023-01-25T12:50:48.578Z

Sánchez avoids the usual announcements and concentrates on uniting the PP and Vox to prepare a year with several elections in sight

Pedro Sánchez is a politician in love with the surprise effect.

In almost every debate, he reserves a star announcement that sets the agenda and complicates the reaction of the opposition, which usually does not know where the president will go.

It is a technique that he has practiced for almost the entire legislature.

But this time in Congress there was none.

The stage of the legislative maelstrom of the Government, which according to him claims, has promoted 190 legal initiatives, seems to have come to an end.

The heart of the political strategy of the president and his team is already in the long electoral campaign, which is now focused on trying to deactivate Alberto Núñez Feijóo's attempt to grab votes from the PSOE with the idea that he is a moderate leader and place him in the bloc on the right with Vox, the only possible ally that the PP has to govern.

02:37

Sánchez: "Mrs. Gamarra, do you think that Spain is on the way to a dictatorship?"

The PP parliamentary spokesperson in Congress, Cuca Gamarra, in plenary session of the Congress of Deputies, on January 24, 2023. Photo: Europa Press |

Video: EPV

The Basque Nationalist Party indirectly helps Sánchez in this strategy.

Aitor Esteban even raised with Sánchez the possibility of repeating the current majority in the next legislature, an implicit way of sending a clear message from the PNV, perhaps the party that best sniffs out the underlying currents of Spanish politics: our option is this majority, the idea of agreeing again with Feijóo's PP as we did with Aznar's and Rajoy's is not on the table.

With Vox in the equation it would be totally impossible.

Santiago Abascal has directly raised the outlawing of the PNV.

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Concentrated on the campaign, Sánchez and the PSOE, with their spokesman, Patxi López, in a speech that was especially applauded by their bench, attacked Vox.

Santiago Abascal, who has spent a few months of little prominence after the Andalusian fiasco, has returned to the fore with the anti-abortion plan in Castilla y León and with the demonstration in Madrid on Saturday.

In a mocking tone, almost satire, Sánchez made an effort to assimilate the PP with Vox because the popular, although they maintained a discreet tone, supported the demonstration.

The president also launched himself in a torrent against Cuca Gamarra, the PP spokesperson, in a tone already of an open electoral campaign.

"There is no Government, State or God that can decide on the body of women," cried Patxi López with her bench standing.

The rejection of Vox is the great mobilizer of the socialist deputies.

At the top, they hope that it will also be true for the progressive electorate, as in 2019, something much more difficult to achieve.

To achieve this, Sánchez is no longer shy about even imagining scenes of a PP-Vox coalition government, something that politicians do not usually do in the campaign, because it means assuming that they can lose.

The PSOE leader raised an image: a bilateral press conference with Macron, like the one last Thursday in Barcelona, but with Feijóo president in coalition with Vox.

“A journalist asked Macron what he thought of the pacts between the right and the ultra-right to govern.

Can you imagine the embarrassment for Spain if a coalition government with Vox had been at the press conference with Macron? ”, He cried.

Macron was very harsh with the idea, and went so far as to say that he does not agree with normalizing the ultra-right because "it is hatred of the other."

Feijóo tries every day to flee from this idea of the blocks, because he knows that as long as he is seen close to Vox it is very difficult for him to get votes from the center, much less from the PSOE.

But in La Moncloa they are convinced that reality will prevail over Feijóo's attempt to evade an undeniable truth: the PP has been left alone with Vox, because its territorial policy has distanced it from old allies such as the PNV, but above all of the remains of the old Convergència.

02:23

Sánchez mocks Abascal's delay in presenting the motion of censure

The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, in plenary session of the Congress of Deputies, on January 24, 2023, in Madrid. Photo: Europa Press |

Video: EPV

Sánchez hammers time and time again, and that will be the axis of his campaign, with the idea that with the PP model, which carried out a controversial pension reform that set the maximum annual increase at 0.25%, today the pension average would rise 2.39 euros, while with this Executive an average of 107 euros have risen, 8.5%.

Although pensions do not dominate the media agenda, in La Moncloa they are convinced that the 10 million people who collect them, and this week they are seeing the first big increase in the payroll in January, have a political effect of fine rain with much more impact than any manifestation of the right.