In the municipal and regional elections four years ago, the Pedro Sánchez brand rose after the motion of no confidence that evicted Mariano Rajoy from La Moncloa. The PSOE was the party with the most votes in the city councils, retained the six regional governments it was already running at the time -Comunidad Valenciana, Castilla-La Mancha, Aragón, Extremadura, the Balearic Islands and Asturias- and added three more to the list -Navarra, Canarias and La Rioja-.
The president had not yet said that “he could not sleep” with Podemos in the Government just before signing the agreement with the purples to form the first Democratic coalition Executive after the repetition of the 2019 general elections. This unprecedented circumstance, together with the elevation to the category of parliamentary partners of ERC and EH Bildu, with their consequent concessions throughout the legislature, has ended up causing a fracture in the socialist ranks themselves.
The clearest voices of the distancing from the political line that is marked in the Ferraz headquarters have been those of the presidents of Castilla-La Mancha, Emiliano García-Page, and Aragón, Javier Lambán, despite the fact that in the case of the latter governs with a quadripartite also made up of the formation founded by Pablo Iglesias. The disapproval of this strategy of pacts has also been extended to a group of former senior officials that includes ministers such as José Luis Corcuera and César Antonio Molina, who have even signed public manifestos against the repeal of the crime of sedition – to replace it with that of aggravated public disorder- and the reduction of penalties in that of embezzlement.
Others out of conviction, such as Ximo Puig (Valencian Community) and Francina Armengol (Balearic Islands), and the rest due to party discipline, defend, on the other hand, that Sánchez’s concessions to the Catalan independence movement have contributed to “damp down” the conflict and that the situation today “has nothing to do with that of 2017”, when the illegal referendum was held. The Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, has even suggested that the party leaders should “use” the agreements with ERC as an “electoral asset.”
However, even Sánchez himself avoids mentioning in his interventions the benefits to those involved in the process to try to pivot his discourse on positive economic data and now also around the strategy of promoting affordable housing. For this reason, it caused a certain “perplexity” among those attending, last weekend, at the municipal convention that the PSOE held in Valencia that José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero brought up an issue that divides the party in two and to which none of the other participants in the act publicly referred to.
«All the comrades of the PSOE in every corner of Spain have the duty, the commitment and the conviction, which is the most important thing, to say that thanks to the Government of Pedro Sánchez the future of the unity of Spain is in a time of stability and of tranquility. The decision that distinguishes a president for leading a vision of the future is the decision he made when applying the pardons”, remarked the politician who was in charge of La Moncloa between 2004 and 2012 on the release, in 2021, of the nine sentenced by the Supreme Court to prison for the illegal referendum of 1-O.
The direct beneficiary of the “lowering of the independence soufflé” to which they refer in Ferraz is the socialist party in Catalonia, which does not hold regional elections on 28-M, but which does have high expectations of being able to recover the Mayor’s Office of Barcelona, ??in which is now listed as a minority shareholder. According to his polls, Jaume Collboni will be the candidate with the most votes, although he will be forced to negotiate a coalition government with the commons of the current mayoress, Ada Colau, ERC and Junts, to whom, among other conditions to agree, he will demand “respect to the Constitution.”
In the territories where these issues make them particularly uncomfortable, the PSOE candidates strive to present the campaign in a purely autonomous way, although not always with the desired result. The latest polls published by EL MUNDO point to a probable scenario that in Castilla-La Mancha and Aragón a sum of the right-wing parties could unseat both Page and Lambán despite the fact that their management is not particularly questioned.
In addition to the concessions to the Catalan independence movement, in the group of socialists critical of Sánchez they consider that the coalition with Podemos has led him to adopt “populist positions” and that it is “unacceptable” that he negotiate with Bildu, the “heirs” of the terrorist group who murdered several of his fellow ranks, according to one of the former leaders of the party.
They also disapprove of the Historical Memory Law – which, in addition to Zapatero, the president himself does boast of – because they believe that it is trying to impose a “biased vision” of the Civil War and the Dictatorship.
The confrontation of different sensibilities within the PSOE was already experienced during the primaries for the leadership of the party that faced Susana Díaz and Pedro Sánchez in 2017. The current Secretary General of the Socialists then defended that Spain was “a nation of nations” and advocated recognizing “the Catalan national identity in the Constitution”, to which the Andalusian leader, finally defeated, was radically opposed.
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