Ángel Collado
The PSOE is preparing to manage its foreseeable general setback in the regional and municipal elections on 28 May through pacts with parties on the extreme left, while the PP fears that its announced progress will be obscured by the need to reach agreements with the extreme right.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo and the PP candidates are ignoring Vox in the campaign with the aim of obtaining clear majorities and having more regional deputies or councillors than the sum of the left in order not to depend on Santiago Abascal’s party wherever they can form a government.
The strategy of the two major parties in the polls is as different as the aspirations of their leaders. For Sánchez, it is a preliminary step before the general elections at the end of the year in which he will be examined at the head of his coalition of socialists and communists supported in Congress by the Catalan and Basque pro-independence parties.
The secretary general of the PSOE has made it normal for his party to present itself as the head of a front of radical and even anti-constitutional formations, while Feijóo is committed to the full autonomy of his party’s project as a government alternative.
In the run-up to May 28, the Socialists hope to revalidate the majorities of their coalitions with populists and local nationalists in regions such as Valencia, Aragon, the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, Asturias and Navarre. Only in Extremadura and especially in Castilla-La Mancha do they stand to win on their own.
In the case of the PP, the ideal model is that of Isabel Díaz Ayuso in Madrid, four seats short of an absolute majority in the elections two years ago, and who now takes on the challenge of improving those results so as not to depend on Vox, not even when its abstention is enough.
To make their weight count and halt Ayuso’s rise in recent months, the right-wing populists have not hesitated to add their votes to the left-wing bloc in the Madrid Assembly in order to overturn fundamental projects such as the community’s budgets or a specific plan to attract foreign investment to the region.
Madrid is an example of how complicated the PP’s relations with Vox could be after the elections, where the seats of Abascal’s party are necessary for a change of government. According to the polls, although the PP candidates have a good chance of winning the most votes in the Valencian Community, the Balearic Islands and Aragon, they would need Vox to complete their majority in any case.
The demoscopic prospects in Castilla-La Mancha oscillate between a new absolute majority for the only socialist regional president who openly dissociates himself from Sánchez and his partners, Emiliano García-Page, or a combination, in this case inevitable, of the PP with Abascal’s party.
Feijóo consciously avoids any commitment to a post-election pact with Vox, as do all his party’s candidates. They do not even want to hear about it, given the source of problems that sharing an executive with the populists in the Junta de Castilla y León (the only coalition cabinet with the extreme right so far) has meant for the PP, and how they are trying to get the limelight in Madrid from the opposition.
Despite the official silence on the matter, the internal debate has opened up among Popular leaders. Abascal is already campaigning with the warning that he will demand a global pact throughout Spain with a distribution of posts in the government teams where they are called upon to support short majorities of the Popular Party. Vox rejects the autonomous state on principle, but now wants positions of responsibility in all institutions and presents itself as an unavoidable complement to the centre-right majorities.
The PP assures that it will not enter into an exchange of power quotas in general and that, in any case, negotiations would have to take place in each community and city council, institution by institution. No global pacts at the national level.
Feijóo is gambling a good part of his chances of winning the general elections at the end of the year on the management of his relations with Vox after the 28 May elections. Sánchez will use these post-election pacts to exploit the PP’s dependence on the extreme right in his discourse. And Abascal needs to mortgage Feijóo’s race to power and for Vox to survive without its voters returning to the centre-right fold regrouped in the PP, as has already happened with those of Ciudadanos.
