Vox throws in the towel in Madrid and turns to the communities where the PP needs it to unseat the PSOE

Santiago Abascal gathered about 300 people in Chinchon on Thursday. The attendees only occupied a small part of the monumental square of this town of 5,600 inhabitants in the southeast of the Community of Madrid. It is not surprising if one takes into account that Vox only obtained 200 votes here in the municipal elections of 2019.

More surprising is that this is the only rally that the leader of the ultra party has scheduled in the Community in the entire election campaign. In the capital, where Vox obtained almost 125,000 votes in the municipal elections and touched 300,000 in the last general elections, Abascal has not appeared since the 12th. A notable absence, since its hyper-leadership is the main revulsive of Vox to mobilize its supporters. The president of the ultra party was only seen on the 5th in the Madrid neighborhood of Hortaleza, in the presentation of candidates of his party in the region, but the campaign had not yet begun and the auditorium was filled with the members of the 179 lists of Vox in the Community of Madrid.

All the polls predict that the president of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, will win the elections again on 28-M and will even improve her 2021 results: if she does not reach an absolute majority, she will stay close. In the event that the PP does not achieve it, it is likely to surpass the left bloc in seats, and that result would put the ultra party in the position of having to add its votes to those of the opposition, voting against Ayuso, if it wants to assert its strength. The leaders of Vox rule out this possibility, so they would only have the alternative of voting in favor of Ayuso in exchange for wresting some programmatic concessions, as two years ago, or abstaining. What does not seem within his reach is to force in Madrid a coalition Executive with the PP, like the one that already exists in Castilla y León, and as Abascal intends to repeat now in other autonomous communities and, after the generals, in the Government of Spain.

Santiago Abascal, during a Vox event in Chinchón (Madrid), on Thursday. Mateo Lanzuela (Europa Press)

Vox is aware that Ayuso has stolen the speech, even advocating the illegalization of Bildu, but, beyond highlighting the contradictions between it and the national leadership of the PP, and even of her with herself – the president of Madrid attacks against the 2030 Agenda of the United Nations while boasting of compliance with the Sustainable Development Goals included in it, Abascal directs the bulk of his artillery towards other targets: the PSOE, which he describes as "the partner of Bildu", and Alberto Núñez Feijóo, whom he reproaches for proposing to let the most voted list govern in each institution, discarding a pact of the right where PP and Vox add a majority.

Forcing Feijóo to admit him as an essential government partner and reneging on his words is the central objective of Vox before the 28-M. Faced with his absence from Madrid, Abascal will give four rallies in Castilla-La Mancha in the last week of the campaign: Guadalajara (Saturday), Ciudad Real (Sunday), Albacete (Sunday) and Toledo, where he will celebrate the great closing act, already on Friday 26. The polls suggest that the socialist Emiliano García-Page would maintain the absolute majority by the minimum, but if he does not reach it, the PP could only unseat him with the support of Vox, which for the first time would enter the regional Parliament.

A similar situation occurs in the Valencian Community, where the polls give a very even result between the left-wing tripartite, headed by the socialist president Ximo Puig, and the sum of PP and Vox. Valencia was the square chosen by Abascal for the kick-off of his campaign, on the 12th, and will return to that community on the penultimate day, with a rally in Alicante on the 24th. Also in Extremadura (Abascal was in Badajoz on April 28 and went to Cáceres on Friday) the PP would be essential the support of Vox to overthrow Guillermo Fernández Vara if PSOE and Podemos do not achieve a majority.

Of the communities where only municipal elections are held, Abascal has not gone to Galicia, Feijóo's fiefdom, nor to Castilla y León, where he governs in coalition. His visits to the Basque Country and Catalonia have had a strong symbolic content: he was in Vitoria, his native province, and in Barcelona's Plaza de Artós, a traditional scenario of confrontation between ultras and independentists. And on Thursday he will be in Seville, the most important City Council governed by the PSOE in all of Spain, in which Vox aspires to have the key that gives the mayor's office to the PP. On the other hand, Abascal has not stepped on the most important cities governed by the PP throughout the campaign: neither Madrid, nor Zaragoza, nor Malaga.

There are only two institutions controlled by the popular in which Vox has thrown the rest. One is the Region of Murcia, in whose capital he held a mass rally on February 12, and where he will return on Tuesday with an act in Cartagena. The president of Murcia, Fernando López Miras, of the PP, dispensed with Vox in the previous legislature by agreeing with the deputies that Abascal expelled from his party, and this one wants to force him now to give entry to his representatives in the Government.

But the place in which the ultra leader plans to take cold revenge on the PP is Ceuta, where he will go on Tuesday. After Vox was the most voted force in the November 2019 general elections, the Assembly declared Abascal persona non grata for fueling the tension between the communities that live in the city in the midst of the border crisis with Morocco, a motion that went ahead thanks to the abstention of the Ceuta president, the popular Juan Vivas. Abascal has not yet forgiven him.

He receives every afternoon the bulletin Diario de elecciones, written by the deputy director of EL PAÍS Claudi Pérez. And here, the x-ray of all the communities that go to the polls.

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