A euphoria that was unthinkable a few weeks ago has been unleashed in the PSOE. The state of mind of the socialists does not correspond to the end to eight years of Government that all the surveys predict, except the CIS. The collective ecstasy at the rally in which Ferraz reconverted the federal committee that approved the lists to Congress and the Senate is summed up in an image, the kiss between Pedro Sánchez and Begoña Gómez, and two words: “I love you.”
The President of the Government has once again demonstrated his ability to turn around the attacks from the right and make a symbol of what the PP and Vox believe should be their Achilles heel. If in the 2023 campaign he transformed the insult that was said to him into Perro Sanxe's motto, six weeks before 29-N he has fully included his wife as an electoral ticket.
The purpose is to encourage the progressive electorate to mobilize in the face of what all socialists, from the most critical to those closest to Sánchez, think is a judicial persecution for political purposes. At the end of September, days before his retirement, the controversial investigating judge Juan Carlos Peinado signed the resolution to open an oral trial with a popular jury against Gómez and his assistant in La Moncloa, Cristina Álvarez, for the crimes of influence peddling and embezzlement. "Today Begoña is with me. And I wanted to thank you for being my wife, for being the mother of my daughters and for being my wife. They have tried to break us in every way and they have achieved just the opposite: today we are stronger than ever. I love you," Sánchez proclaimed in an exceptional gesture, since he is known for being very little given to displaying his emotions. Gómez's tears of emotion, before the ministers and territorial leaders of the PSOE, have further boosted the mood at the Tomás y Valiente Art Center in Fuenlabrada (Madrid), overwhelmed by the 3,000 militants and sympathizers who attended the event this Saturday inside and outside the pavilion on a giant screen.
Far from falling into defeatism, optimism has taken over the PSOE. The motivation of its leaders is general, even more so after the pact of the joint lists with the Broad Front in the Senate, and has nothing to do with the ash atmosphere with which they faced the 2023 general election campaign. The feeling shared by the territorial leaders is that they can be the first force and that they will attract useful votes after the image that the alternative left gave with their lack of agreement on the lists to Congress after two weeks of vaudeville. In Ferraz and La Moncloa they are not deceived that the fracture between the Frente Amplio and Podemos makes the possibility of revalidating the Government even more difficult. The reaction of the PSOE has been to conspire for another impossible comeback in the face of the “setback” attributed to the PP's alliance with the far-right Vox.
“I am convinced that we are going to win with a much larger majority than in 2019 and 2023. Every time I see much more mobilization and much more fear on the right,” Sánchez urged a dedicated audience, in which Emiliano García-Page and leaders who were left off the lists were absent, to put up one last fight. Sources close to the president of Castilla-La Mancha have argued that it was a “procedural meeting in which only lists are ratified without the possibility of intervention.”
The general secretary of the PSOE has hammered home the cuts and loss of rights that the PP and Vox would apply if they reached La Moncloa. "The Spaniards do not want cuts disguised as sacrifices. PP and Vox propose sacrifices to women, to pensioners, forgetting any sacrifice for those at the top," insisted the leader of the PSOE, who will make the most of the labyrinth in which Alberto Núñez Feijóo's party has entered in recent days with retirements, a major unforced error in a country with ten million pensioners who vote for the two big parties and are among the most active electoral niches. “They are already saying that the pension system is broken, bankrupt, while we are the ones who have filled the pension piggy bank and revalued them according to the CPI,” he stated.
Sánchez has also linked time and again a future Feijóo Government with Santiago Abascal to the galaxy of the global far-right sponsored by Donald Trump. “They are here, they are in the United States... We must stop the reactionary wave,” he added. "If they like chainsaws, go to the sawmill. But the pensions are not touched!", he elaborated in reference to the Argentine Javier Milei, another international partner of the president of Vox.
The decision of the Supreme Court to prevent more than 160,000 naturalized Spaniards from voting on 29-N has also been used by Sánchez to not make distinctions between PP and Vox. "The Democratic Memory Law has been in force since 2022. It has been voted on in 2023, in 2024 and 2025 and now they want people not to vote. PP and Vox have managed to ensure that there are some grandchildren who do and some grandchildren who do not... And we say that the grandchildren of republican exile have the same rights as the grandchildren of the Franco regime," the president highlighted, before reaching the following conclusion: "If in the opposition "They are capable of cutting a right for thousands of people, what wouldn't they do in the Government?"
The origin of the electoral advance, the defeat of the housing decrees with which the Government reacted to the social unrest due to the eviction of Maricarmen has also had a constant presence. "A woman who died of hopelessness before dying told us all 'What I have suffered, let no one else suffer again'. In honor of her, and the people who are demonstrating in the squares of our country, housing will be our cause and that of the progressive Government of 29-N," Sánchez agreed, wearing a red t-shirt from the beginning with the motto The strength of the people.
Minister Óscar López, Secretary General of Madrid, has influenced this idea: “The strength of the people is what made this Government possible and gave it autonomy and courage to say that Defense spending is not going to be raised to 5%” as Trump has requested without Feijóo clarifying what he would do if he is president. The territorial leader has given other examples in which the Executive has marked its own profile in an international scenario dominated by the right, such as the denunciation of the genocide in Gaza, the recognition of Palestine and the denunciation of the war in Iran, with a very high impact on inflation. "This is not about Pedro Sánchez or Alberto Núñez Feijóo. Do you prefer an image of Feijóo with Trump with his feet on the table approving 5% of military spending?" emphasized the host, Javier Ayala, the mayor of a city where the PSOE has always governed since the restoration of democracy.
Aranzazu Figueroa, a rising stock after her recent election as general secretary of the Socialist Youth, has also encouraged the working class vote. "When Feijóo talks about making sacrifices, he talks about sacrificing the interests of the working majority, your salary, your paid vacations, your grandfather's pension and your public services. Those are the sacrifices they talk about," he reiterated.
The leader of the federal leadership has appealed especially to the young vote, which in 2023 went to the PSOE, but in which Vox has a huge pull. "I tell my generation that we cannot resign ourselves. The future is not written, we can write it with our hands. When we burst the ballot boxes with votes for progress we are unstoppable and we have an opportunity on 29-N that we cannot waste as a generation. We must tell them loud and clear that they will not pass," he stated, citing the Republicans' motto in the defense of Madrid against the coup plotters in the Civil War.
Torró, new spokesperson after the resignation of Mínguez
Before the rally, the federal executive of the PSOE has approved the appointment of the organization secretary, Rebeca Torró, as the new spokesperson for the party after the resignation of Montse Mínguez due to the controversy over her partner's real estate businesses. Cristina Narbona, president of the party, has in turn assumed the area of studies and programs that Mínguez also led.
Next, the federal committee has ratified parity lists in which for the first time there will be more women than men leading the candidates for Congress: 52%, complying with the mandate of the 41st Congress of the PSOE. The party has reached parity in the set of candidates for the Cortes Generales, with 444 women and 443 men.
As expected, the federal committee has unanimously proclaimed Sánchez as a candidate for the presidency of the Government. The meeting has not reached its full hour and no one has asked to speak, according to sources from the socialists' highest decision-making body.
