PP and Vox: the crudest campaign

BarcelonaShortly after the announcement of the election call, the PP's social media accounts circulated a video showing Minister Óscar Puente writhing in pain after breaking his leg. And the New Generations, one showing immigrants in Ceuta with the slogan: "Either them or us." These were two samples of where the party aspiring to govern Spain intends to take the campaign. Also on the same day, Isabel Díaz Ayuso and Vox asked their voters not to even think about voting by mail, thus sowing doubt about whether the current government is preparing a rigging. This is a scarecrow that the right has been waving for some time, with the idea of portraying Pedro Sánchez as an aspiring dictator.

In fact, the election call itself has surprised many of the right-wing media spokespeople, who had long predicted that Sánchez would stretch the deadlines for holding the elections to the maximum and that, in the worst case, he would seek an excuse not to bring them forward. Since this obviously has not happened, now the goal of the right is to make people believe first that the Spanish mail-in vote counting system is not reliable because the evil Sánchez, who controls the public company Correos, can manipulate it; and second, that the Spanish government has approved the so-called grandchildren's law to alter the electoral census and add the votes of the descendants of exiled Spanish republicans and thus gain voters.

In reality, neither one thing nor the other holds up in the slightest. The mail-in vote is physically impossible to manipulate in a company with 40,000 employees. In fact, that is why the PP is now trying to backtrack. And the impact of the grandchildren's law is minimal, because it is a group that votes very little. But that does not matter to them, because it is not about reporting possible irregularities, but about creating an environment so unbreathable, so high-tension, that it makes a comfortable victory for the right on November 29th inevitable. Once again, however, they are playing with fire, because discrediting institutions and trust in the system could end up turning against them like a boomerang if it leads to a social outburst or the appearance of new populist parties.

In any case, what can also be guessed behind this strategy is a certain nervousness now that the moment of truth has arrived, in which the ghost of the 2023 elections, when Sánchez managed to survive against all odds, surely weighs, and heavily. If you have to play so dirty and stoop so low, it means you are not entirely sure; therefore, it is a sign of weakness. What awaits us will, with absolute certainty, be the toughest and crudest campaign in Spanish democratic history, because all limits will be exceeded to reach the 29th in a climate of maximum civil war-like tension. It is an authentic irresponsibility that we will all end up paying for. But for some reason, it seems that the Spanish right thinks it has no other way to reach power.