Hillary Clinton and Pedro Sánchez, at La Moncloa on Tuesday. Fernando Calvo / MONCLOA PALACE (EFE)
Pedro Sánchez has dissolved the Cortes, and everything is already a campaign, without a solution of continuity with that of the regional and municipal ones. Coincidence has meant that just this Tuesday the president had planned a meeting with Hillary Clinton, Democratic candidate in the US defeated by Donald Trump in 2016, who was passing through Spain for a conference in Barcelona. And Sánchez has taken advantage of Clinton's visit to La Moncloa to talk about one of the issues that will be the central axis of his campaign, already practically launched: the fight against populism, especially ultra-right, Trumpian style, which also ravages Europe, and also reaches Spain. According to La Moncloa, the two leaders dedicated a good part of their talk "to the threats that populisms represent for democracies and how they use tools such as disinformation, the manipulation of the adversary's political messages and their dehumanization, even reaching attacks on their personal reputation."
The analysis that is made in the environment of Sánchez of the electoral defeat of the PSOE in the autonomic ones, much harder than expected, focuses especially on the extraordinary mobilization of the right, which in his opinion has been achieved thanks to exaggerations, hoaxes or the recovery of issues of the past such as ETA terrorism. outside the management of autonomies and municipalities. Sánchez seems to have taken a clear turn and if in the campaign of the autonomic avoided practically any mention of Vox or the far right, now he has placed this issue in the foreground in what seems to be one of the axes of his speech for the generals.
This Tuesday, in a message on Twitter to claim the drop in inflation, Sánchez finished with a clear campaign message: "Social democratic measures work and benefit the social majority of this country. That's what the far right can't stand." Later, in his message on Clinton's visit, he added that "the strategy of the reactionaries is always the same: lies, hoaxes and hate speech. We've seen it in the U.S. and Brazil. In Spain we are not going to allow it." Sánchez already spoke about this issue with Joe Biden at the White House in his recent visit in the middle of the municipal campaign.
And then he added another message along the same lines: "Denialism ruins our environment and risks ruining local economies. Let's save Doñana", said the president about the news of the boycott in Germany to the strawberry of Huelva so that the Andalusian Government withdraws its project to legalize irrigation in the surroundings of the park. Clinton, recalls La Moncloa, suffered like Sánchez a smear campaign and harassment by the right in the 2016 campaign. "The advance of populism, especially of the extreme right, is evident in the United States, Latin America and Europe, especially during electoral processes, where they use the same strategy: lies, hoaxes and hate speech. And the discrediting of the institutions before the voters", concludes La Moncloa.
