The cave already projects the shadow of Sánchez's deception

If Sánchez can extend his term to the maximum – and God knows that would fit his survivor's nature – the next elections could fall in August 2027. This has alerted several media outlets on the hard right, who directly equate it to a fraud: they consider that since the rich take more holidays than the poor, the right-wing vote is penalized, said broadly. This is the thesis of an editorial in Ok diario, which headlines with the Spanish word pucherazo, and adds that, besides the holiday issue, the fact that for the justice system that is an inauspicious month also weighs in. Periodista Digital also speaks of “malpractice of the electoral calendar” in the face of hypothetical elections in August that no one has confirmed. Is there cunning in this possible choice? Surely: as every time a politician decides the date of the elections. Of course, there is a calculation. But brandishing the ghost of fraud is dangerous, because it feeds narratives of stolen elections, which are the antechamber to denying the legitimacy of the resulting governments and, therefore, open the door – taken to the extreme – to monstrosities like the assault on the United States Capitol, to cite an already occurred example.

The cave has been placing this idea of fraud in the narrative for some time. They did so when The Objective published that video in which a ballot box was being paraded up and down during the PSOE Federal Committee in 2016. Or EsRadio – sister of Libertad digital– when it suggested that the way to manipulate the elections will be by fiddling with the voter roll with the entry of immigrants. Of course, all these media outlets that wave the scarecrow of electoral fraud may be considered ideological heirs of those who spurred the military coup against republican legality in 1936 is, as they say in the movies, mere coincidence.