Seeing the images of Pedro Sánchez dancing euphorically at the end of the great rally to consecrate his candidacy in Fuenlabrada, the question arises naturally: is the leader of the PSOE so convinced that he can repeat the miracle of 2023 and continue in La Moncloa? According to different people around him consulted, it is not a posturing, although every candidate is obliged to convey enthusiasm if he wants people to vote for him.
Sánchez called the elections with many doubts, with the polls very against him, after a very tough summer and early autumn with the Ceuta crisis, but now, as he has explained several times these days, in public and private, he is euphoric because he believes that "the campaign is where the PSOE wanted it," in his own words.
The president's team is very surprised because he did not expect the PP to help him, with some very obvious errors - especially the word "sacrifices" pronounced by Alberto Núñez Feijóo together with his spokesperson, Ester Muñoz, saying that the pension system "is going to fail" and must be changed - to place the framework in a place from which precisely the PP and Vox had managed to escape the entire legislature: the debate on public services, on pensions, on public health and education, on intervention in the housing market. The mobilizations, the education strikes in Madrid, the Sol camp and the death of Maricarmen have placed the central debate of the pre-campaign far from the issues that most harm the Executive and the PP most dominates -Ceuta, corruption, adverse judicial decisions- but everything is open, there are many days left and the campaign can turn at any time.
“Feijóo has blended in with Vox these three years,” explains a member of the Government very close to the campaign. "He has dedicated himself only to anti-Sanchism. And now the campaign arrives and his spokespersons are incapable of talking about the underlying issues without screwing up. Feijóo has a drama with his team and it could cost him very dearly in the campaign," he concludes.
While Sánchez believes that the pre-campaign has turned against him, the PP is convinced that it is exactly the other way around, because the days go by and the Government, and even more so now with the division of the vote in the space to its left, is unable to move anything at all in the daily polls that the parties are doing. The Popular Party, according to members of its leadership consulted, see an unstoppable undercurrent of right-wing society, which was already seen in the last regional elections, where PP and Vox reached close to 60% support in some cases, and they believe that no Sánchez campaign can reverse that.
Furthermore, although Feijóo does not publicly convey the same euphoria as Sánchez, and prefers the prudence of not giving “any vote lost or won until the polls are closed,” as he said on Monday, sources around him clearly indicate that the pre-campaign is benefiting them above all due to the case of Montse Mínguez, the PSOE spokesperson, who resigned on Friday after 48 hours of criticism because her partner has a family business with more than 30 apartments and has some evictions. In the PP they believe that this case "busts Sánchez's campaign plan with housing" and gives his party all the space to criticize his "hypocrisy." The socialists consider, on the contrary, that Mínguez's quick resignation prevents the PP and Vox from using that weapon.
The popular ones are convinced that the president has now clung to pensions because housing does not give him a single vote. "We have never understood that the housing issue can benefit the left. We believe that Sánchez is going to get out of there quickly, the Maricarmen effect has not existed. And no one believes that Feijóo is going to cut pensions. Does the left really believe that he is going to snatch pensioners from the PP with this speech? Ada Colau, Irene Montero and Bildu are much more scary than this pension thing. The PSOE has no way to reverse the trend, 10 days of pre-campaign and nothing “it moves”, summary.
Faced with the enthusiasm, fake or not, of the headquarters of the two major parties, experts place things at a greater distance. Belén Barreiro, the director of 40dB., which conducts the polls for EL PAÍS and Cadena SER, points out that this is a very initial moment, that it is very difficult for what is happening now in the pre-campaign to be decisive for the elections, and points out that her data does not yet detect significant movements regarding the survey that indicated a very comfortable victory for the right and the extreme right with 196 seats. "It is not well understood why the PP screws up so much in the campaign, it is something that it has been doing frequently, but at the moment we do not know what consequences it will have. What we are seeing is that mobilization on both sides is increasing. Those who say they are going to vote for sure have grown 10 points in a week, who put 10 on the scale of 1 to 10. That is a strong movement. A very important participation is pointed out. We have the participation indicator now at the level that it will be in 2023. We had it two days before voting. It is strong and that makes everything unpredictable, but the right is very mobilized, in fact even more than the left," he points out. Barreiro believes that the PSOE could become the first party depending on what happens in the campaign, but with Vox so strong, the right-wing group has a good chance of achieving a comfortable absolute majority.
Narciso Michavila, director of GAD3, considers the battle almost doomed, although he thinks that the enormous distance that his polls - and the majority - now show between the right-wing bloc and the left-wing bloc will reduce. "That is going to be reduced, but the most normal thing is that there will be a turnaround and the right-wing bloc will have the absolute majority. If the PSOE manages to be the first party it is because the left will be very weak," he points out. He also believes that it is a mistake for the PP to open the pension debate, although he sees it soon for it to be definitive. "The PSOE was wrong in proposing the housing elections, but it was right with pensions. It is one of Sánchez's strong points," he points out. "What is true is that the left was in a flat encephalogram and now we see it reactivating. There will be a very high participation, but the reversal [the victory of the right] is still by far the most probable."
Ignacio Urquizu, director of Metroscopia and professor of sociology at the Complutense University, also does not see at the moment that this pre-campaign is moving anything significant in the polls. "We are doing a second wave this week and everything is quite stable. We do not see at the moment that mobilization of the left that the PSOE expects. Although we do see that on the left the feeling of "anger" is increasing and that of "tiredness" is decreasing. And that is a symptom. The right has been in the "anger" for a long time. The vote is about moods. And the left is beginning to get angry and see some hope. We see a change in mood but it is not yet seen in the estimates of voting that we do. There would have to be a huge movement to change the trend in favor of the right-wing bloc," he says. What he does believe is that if the PP continues making mistakes, it will be difficult for it to go above 30% and it will allow Vox to take “a huge bite.”
Sandra León, a researcher at the CSIC, specialized in public policies, believes that the errors of the PP and this atypical start to the pre-campaign are surprising, but "they can have a very limited effect because we are still very far from the elections." "The right is hypermobilized in anti-Sanchism, that is not going to change, but it is true that the PP needs something more than that, it needs proposals, and when it gets in there it gets into trouble. The PP will try to bring up the issues that have hurt Sánchez, for example, what happens if Puigdemont returns. There is a lot left, the battle is not yet defined," he says. The two big players believe, therefore, that things are getting in their face, but experts point out that at the moment no major movements have been detected. But everyone agrees that there is still a lot left and, above all, that a huge participation is expected, which makes everything much more unpredictable.
