Pedro Sánchez’s electoral strategy involves assuming that he will not be able to govern alone and that his only chance of staying at the helm of La Moncloa is a reissue of the two-color government. This was evidenced last week during the debate on the investiture motion, in which she shared the limelight with Yolanda Díaz in an attempt to strengthen the image of understanding with her government partner, United We Can, and now she is trying to do pedagogy so that the message stall.
“The public has understood that we are going to go for coalition formulas. There is no other,” said the Spanish president in an informal conversation with journalists during the trip to China to meet with his counterpart in the Asian giant, Xi Jinping. And he points out the two factors that, in his opinion, make up this political chessboard with no alternative: the fragmentation of the vote and the fact that minority parties have opted to claim quotas of power in exchange for their parliamentary support.
In this context, Sánchez considers that in the general elections at the end of May what is at stake is the dilemma between “a much more competitive left-wing candidacy” and another that oscillates between “weaknesses” and – paraphrasing Ramón Tamames – the ” extremes”, referring to the PP and Vox. While he shows off that he does put his cards on the table, he veiledly accuses Alberto Núñez Feijóo of keeping the ace up his sleeve that, if necessary, he will govern with Santiago Abascal’s party because, according to the president’s forecast, the leader of The opposition also has no chance of achieving an absolute majority.
Although his hectic schedule outside of Spain leads him to undertake his third international tour in a week this Thursday, Sánchez has also activated the electoral mode for a year with a triple appointment with the polls that will begin with the regional and municipal elections on May 28. His intention is to have “enough space” in a campaign in which Catalonia is going to be one of his priorities, arguing that “time proves the reunion policy right”, in reference to the reduction of inflammation in the independence conflict.
In fact, after landing back from his express visit to Beijing, the president plans to attend a PSC event this Sunday in Hospitalet de Llobregat. In addition, among his most realistic objectives he has placed the recovery of the Mayor’s Office of Barcelona, for which he is very confident in the “possibilities” of his candidate, Jaume Collboni, with a view to leading the coalition that, according to polls, will also Barcelona will be doomed again.
In the national sphere, Sánchez has insisted that, for the first time in an “unprecedented context” marked by the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine, an “understanding between the left” has been achieved, which “has historically always been more complex”. In this sense, he has downplayed the fact that the Minister of Social Rights and member of his Government’s ‘dwelling’ quota, Ione Belarra, did not appear at a press conference on Tuesday to explain his Housing Law and has also avoided explicitly supporting Yolanda Díaz in her struggle with Podemos to lead the political space to the left of the socialists.
The president, likewise, has described the agreement for the pension reform, which will be approved this Thursday in Congress, as a “match point”, and which, together with the labor reform, considers that they have been “high voltage” measures in which the opposition hoped that “the decision” of the Government and that in themselves “justify” the legislature, because “they decide the disbursement of European funds”. For this reason he has criticized the “unfortunate image” that in his opinion Feijóo has given by going to Brussels to “criticize everything”.
Sánchez has also appealed to the “responsibility” of the CEOE to sit down to negotiate the rent agreement with the unions. And what he has not wanted to rule on is the decision of the Supreme Court to force the reinstatement of General Diego Pérez de los Cobos, dismissed by his Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska: for that he says that he is going to wait to read the judgment.
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