Sánchez starts the campaign on the attack

In politics it is rectified without saying it. Nobody admits it openly, but the campaign of the regional and municipal elections designed by La Moncloa with a positive message to vindicate its management and make announcements of new measures has been a clear failure. Sunday's vote shows that the PP mobilized much more to the right with its slogan "repeal sanchismo" than the PSOE managed to encourage progressives with its "vote what you think". It seems quite evident that at this time, as happens in much of the planet, feelings are mobilized more than management. So Pedro Sánchez has taken a complete turn and in his first major act of campaign kick-off for the generals – the speech before his deputies and senators, on Wednesday in Congress – he has clearly pointed out where his message will go in the coming weeks, with which he will try to turn around the hard defeat of Sunday. A campaign on the attack, trying to mobilize the progressives who in 2019 made him win the elections with a very clear idea: to stop a "Trumpist" right, an "extreme right and extreme right", the PP and Vox, which for him are barely distinguishable anymore.

Sánchez points out that the world, and especially Europe, is experiencing a conservative wave that is also reaching Spain. But with the numbers on the table, he believes that it could be stopped in Spain if the left-wing abstentionists who stayed at home on Sunday came to vote.

The president and his team seem to have understood, after a very hard blow on 28-M that they did not see coming, and that has ended with almost all the regional and local power of the PSOE, that in front of the feeling of antisanchismo, the great mobilizer of the right, they must counterpose another passion. And they have chosen to stop a right that they consider Trumpist. "The best Spain against the gray and dark Spain", summarizes the president.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo will do everything he can, especially delaying the formation of regional governments with Vox, to try to prevent him from being associated with Santiago Abascal and Sánchez from mobilizing the left against him. Meanwhile, the president of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has no qualms about exhibiting her Trumpism with denunciations of potting, Feijóo always tries to play several bands and claims his moderation, precisely to avoid that mobilization of the left against the right that has caused so many dislikes to the PP in the past.

The leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, on Wednesday in Barcelona.Andreu Dalmau (EFE)

It happened in 1993, when José María Aznar lost the elections against all odds – and it almost happened again in 1996, when he won by the bare minimum. It happened in 2004, when tens of thousands of left-wing abstentionists voted against what they experienced as a great deception of the Government after 11-M. It came again in 2008, when José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero won against the odds to Mariano Rajoy by a million votes with an unforeseen mobilization of the left. And again in April 2019, when the fear of Vox again worked as a spring to bring millions of progressives to the polls.

That mobilization of the left did not exist on Sunday, and, nevertheless, the right did. Sanchez led a speech on Wednesday looking for the epic, which went to the roots of the PSOE: "To the 25 workers, 16 typographers, 4 doctors, a teacher, 2 craftsmen, a stonemason and a shoemaker" who founded the party 144 years ago. According to all the polls, tens of thousands of progressives have no intention of voting for him, although they will not go to the PP either: they will stay at home. That's why he tries to get them out of abstention. Sánchez appeals above all to the workers: "Those are the people we represent, whom we defend and on whom we depend to win the PP and Vox." And he contrasts the foundation of the PSOE with that of the Popular Alliance: "Seven former ministers of a dictatorship with the financing of a few bankers."

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This is how the polls are going for the general elections of 23-J

Incidentally, with the request for a "strong and resounding support" and already eliminating the word coalition from its vocabulary, with a pure message of PSOE, it also seeks to fish in all spaces, including that of Yolanda Díaz, as Zapatero did in 2008, when he left IU reduced to the minimum expression.

It seems no coincidence that Sánchez cited recent cases in the United States and Brazil. In the most powerful country in the world, 78 million people voted for Joe Biden in 2020 not because of his management as vice president, nor because of his political history, nor because of his promises of progressive reforms. They voted mostly against Donald Trump, who stayed at 72 and a half million votes and saw how an incredible mobilization of the left and center to vote for an elderly Biden took him out of the White House.

In 2022, 60.3 million Brazilians voted for Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, not so much for his management when he was president, which ended in great controversy, nor for his progressive promises, but above all to remove Jair Bolsonaro from Planalto, the palace of power in Brasilia, a denier who caused Brazil to be one of the countries with the highest mortality on the planet during the pandemic. Lula, like Biden, also managed to get a part of the center to support him to oust Bolsonaro, while the right voted en masse against the two progressive candidates.

Sánchez has everything against him for these elections, and he does not hide it. He knows he's far from the favorite. But he only has one chance of winning, or at least of obtaining a worthy result that allows him to dream of the presidency thanks to the pacts if he manages to prevent PP and Vox from adding an absolute majority: an extraordinary mobilization of progressives.

But is it enough just to vote against? It seems clearly not. For this reason, Sánchez also tries to establish in favor of what his voters could mobilize. In favor of the increase in the minimum wage -47%-, the labor reform, the increase in pensions, the minimum vital income, the euthanasia law, the housing law, or taxes on banks and electricity. Sánchez is trying to convince his potential voters of the radical change that the arrival of the right to power will entail, convinced that, according to polls, a majority of Spaniards support his reforms, although many of them did not turn out to vote on Sunday. "Do they intend to end scholarships for the most needy and establish new scholarships for the rich who have already tried in some autonomous community they lead? Do they want to reimpose segregation in our schools? Do they aspire to cut our health system and resume its privatization with greater intensity, given the results of last May 28? Do they want to end the climate change law and go on to swell the list of countries with denialist governments?", insisted Sánchez.

A vote against the right, but also a vote in favor of its reforms. The campaign has already begun. And the first day makes it very clear that it will not be smooth. The PSOE has radically changed its strategy. Now it remains to be seen which one the PP chooses. But what is certain is that it will be two very intense months.

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