Pedro Sánchez firmly believes that he can revalidate La Moncloa no matter how much the polls indicate otherwise, but for a new comeback like the one in 2023 to be repeated, he needs to mobilize the progressive electorate. From undecided and abstentionist socialist voters to those disenchanted on the left of the PSOE, disappointed by the Cainite wars whose last result at the state level has been the rival candidacies of the Frente Amplio and Podemos.
The President of the Government knows that a new turnaround at the polls depends on a reactivation of the entire space on the left and the non-ideological moderate center that is suspicious of a PP Executive with Vox and that is why he has made a call in his first double of the campaign in La Rioja and Navarra to vote on 29-N so that participation is 75%. If these conditions are met, the socialist candidate is confident that the left-wing bloc will achieve the 176 deputies that give the absolute majority in Congress. The result would be a new progressive Government that could “advance further and sooner in social achievements.” The general elections with the highest participation were those of 1982 (79.97%), in which Felipe González won with 202 seats. The minimum participation occurred in the 2016 elections (66.48%), which Mariano Rajoy won with 137 deputies.
The news has marked the first day of the campaign. Sánchez has taken advantage of Alberto Núñez Feijóo's interview with the YouTuber Jordi Wild and Santiago Abascal's refusal to submit to his questions to attack the candidates of the right-wing bloc. The president has disapproved of the fact that the PP candidate has stated that he did not know about Marcial Dorado's links with drug trafficking in the mid-nineties, when they shared yacht getaways and even trips, as EL PAÍS published. Sánchez recalled that Dorado was detained within the framework of Operation Nécora - although he was later released from prison and did not go to trial - and has questioned the explanation offered by the popular leader. “Today he has the nerve to say that he did not know in 1995 that Marcial Dorado was a drug trafficker,” he stated in Arnedo before 2,000 militants and sympathizers and later in Pamplona before a similar number.
Feijóo already justified in the final stretch of the 2023 campaign that Marcial Dorado was “a smuggler, never a drug trafficker” when they sympathized. However, Alfonso Rueda, Feijóo's successor as president of the Xunta de Galicia, stated then, unlike the leader of the PP, that he did know about Operation Nécora in the nineties. "I had just finished my degree and I learned the same news that everyone else knew. I was informed just like everyone else about everything that was happening," he said. Years after his relationship with Feijóo, Dorado was arrested for drug trafficking and went to prison. “The one who went on vacation not once or twice, but several times with Marcial Dorado, who was arrested in Operation Nécora in 1990, says that in 1995 and 1996 he did not know that he was a drug trafficker,” Sánchez insisted in Pamplona, dusting off the controversial relationship of the popular candidate.
The general secretary of the PSOE has also pointed out Feijóo's refusal to be interviewed by Silvia Intxaurrondo on TVE and that Abascal has been the great absentee from Jordi Wild's interviews, despite the fact that he had promised to attend. A decision, made after the interview in La Revuelta in which he imposed himself on the public and came out very well, which has earned him numerous criticisms from the group of voters that most supports him. “Feijóo does not want to go to Intxaurrondo and Abascal to Jordi Wild and then I am the dictator,” said Sánchez, who recalled how the Vox candidate assured this week that he did not have a formed opinion about Francisco Franco. "Whoever does not have a position on Franco, does have a position on Franco. But Sánchez is a dictator!", he criticized.
Manuel Mariscal, one of Vox's main deputies, has made this legislature an apology for Francoism in Congress, ensuring that "it was a stage of reconstruction, progress and reconciliation." "Enough of the insults and ignominy against Pedro and his family and, therefore, against the socialist family. Enough!", said Javier García, general secretary of the Rioja PSOE at the Arnedo event, where he claimed his initials as those of the "party of respect, tolerance, argument, reason and no to violence." “We have memory and I will never apologize for being a socialist, we have not won rights for them to be taken away from us!”, the president of the regional community, María Chivite, remarked in Pamplona.
Sánchez has also stressed that Feijóo, in his interview with Jordi Wild, has stated “that the President of the Government of Spain must know English” to then acknowledge that he does not speak it and “had not made any effort” to learn it either. “These are those of the culture of effort, those of merit,” he observed. Likewise, he has questioned Abascal's preparation as a potential vice president: "He said [in La Revuelta] that he was not an economist not to mention pensions. Well, these elections are also about the vice president of the Government and mine is going to be Carlos Body, who knows numbers and economics."
