'First we take Barbastro, then we take Madrid'

Today the newsstands were awash in puddles—chip-chap—formed by the saliva of right-wing newspapers, which peddle the idea of ​​the PSOE's electoral defeat as an inevitable prelude to Pedro Sánchez's imminent political demise. Let's look at the front-page headline ofThe World"Sánchez faces disaster in the region that best reflects Spain at the ballot box." Aragon, like the Spanish Ohio: the place that captures the general feeling of the country. Although I would say that here, more than political science or honest statistics—past patterns don't necessarily determine the future—there's only the simple, basic, and primal desire to sell out. gos before hunting it. The reason They also subscribe to the idea of ​​regional elections as if they were the Golden Globes, typically considered the prelude to the Oscars, only here, instead of a vaguely phallic statuette, they hand you the keys to government. The headline was: "The four driving forces behind an election in Aragon with national impact," and they were referring to the influence of farmers, the incorporation of young people as Vox voters, the mobilization (or lack thereof) of the left, and the effect they dub "campaign memory." It's their subtle way of describing the lingering impact in Soria of all the rhetoric they've been spouting in recent weeks about elections that only held interest for them as a battering ram to bring down the door to the Moncloa Palace.

I'm writing this without knowing if the ballot boxes have confirmed the results predicted by the polls, but if they're anything like it, I'm sure we'll see weeks of proclamations of a change of cycle and the usual drivel. It's true that Sánchez has demonstrated a legendary capacity for survival, but in the end, this persistent noise—in the media and on social networks—proves effective and ends up provoking social changes where the electorate reacts more to perceived reality than to experienced reality.