In the general elections of July 2023, 40 of the 48 deputies chosen in Catalonia supported the investiture of Pedro Sánchez, proving key to his continuity in La Moncloa. The popular Alberto Núñez Feijóo was four parliamentarians away from being able to govern and two of them could have come from the provinces of Lérida and Gerona, where the PP was close to getting a representative. In the Ilerdense constituency he lacked 3,509 votes to secure a deputy and in the Girona constituency, only 285 votes.
These figures show how relevant Catalonia will once again be in tipping the balance on 29-N and explain why both Sánchez and Feijóo are focusing on autonomy to mobilize the vote of their potential voters.
Yesterday it was the PSOE candidate for re-election who, from Tarragona, made a call to "vote en masse" to the left to avoid the government overturn that all the polls predict. And Feijóo will do the same on Thursday night from Badalona, the bastion of the popular in Catalonia governed with an absolute majority by Xavier García Albiol, head of the PP list in the province of Barcelona.
Sánchez hopes that this mobilization will begin to take shape in the general strike next Wednesday, November 11. Yesterday the President of the Government stated: «It is a strike that is not against anyone. "It goes in favor of a cause." With these words, the socialist ruled out that the protest was directed against the Government, whom he exonerated for having skyrocketed the cost of living and for having been unable to stop evictions, pillars on which the general strike is based.
From Barcelona, Albiol replied to the socialist. He anticipated that the strike has a "political" character and that it seeks to rally in favor of the left and, in particular, the PSOE. "How dare the Government and its partners support it," the mayor of Badalona also asked himself, to contradict Sánchez who yesterday landed in Catalonia with an argument focused on the international level.
The socialist's script involved clinging to Donald Trump's defeat in the midterm elections and Lula's victory in Brazil to predict that "the wave of the extreme right will also collapse in Spain on 29-N, as it has collapsed in the US and Brazil."
Sánchez accused Feijóo and Vox leader Santiago Abascal of proposing "a trip to the past." «Spain needs progress and the best recipe against regression is called mobilization. If we vote en masse, we will send Feijóo and Abascal home,” he predicted.
The PSOE candidate tried to identify the Spanish right with that of Trump, Milei or Netanyahu. "On 29-N we will tell them with our vote that Spain is governed from Spain, not from Washington, Argentina or Israel," said the socialist, who claimed to be "the lighthouse against the war in Iran or the genocide in Gaza." "We told Trump and the warlords that we were not going to spend 5% of the GDP on Defense and now we will tell him with our vote that we are not going to be the backyard of the far-right international," he added.
The general secretary of the PSOE also tried to incite fear against the right, maintaining that "they will review abortion and euthanasia" if they reach the Government and promised to continue advancing in rights if they manage to remain in La Moncloa: shielding abortion in the Constitution, with new increases in the minimum wage or with a greater revaluation of pensions. "They destroyed democracy in our country, so if they call us left-handed, we are very proud to be so," Sánchez brandished.
The current president tiptoed over the Urda train accident and only mentioned it to blame the PP for not having made enough investment to maintain the railway network during his years of presidency. The socialist alleged that "it has taken 15 years to reverse the cuts in railway matters" to exonerate himself from the accident with 69 victims. «We need to strengthen services and not cut them. That's what elections are also about," he argued in Tarragona.
