Sánchez and the implausible miracles

MadridThe most common question these days among the journalists in Congress themselves is: "And you, what do you think will happen on November 29th? Who will win? It is curious to verify that, at first, practically everyone takes it for granted that the PP will prevail and that it will govern with the support of a few dozen Vox deputies, between 50 and 70. However, if the person being asked looks unsure, their interlocutor also begins to search for arguments to give consistency to their prediction, as if they needed to convince themselves that their forecast is well-founded and a foregone conclusion.

Man –says one to seem persuaded of their hypothesis–, what is clear is that there is already a very consolidated trend. One only needs to look at how the elections went in Andalusia, Aragon, Extremadura, and Castile and León. The PSOE cannot recover; the reaction to the eviction of Maricarmen Abascal and the housing problem is not enough, nor are the PP's errors every time it speaks about pensions. And the conversation continues more or less along this line, until the person who said the socialists have nothing left to do suddenly accepts, interpreting the doubts of their interlocutor, that they are right about one thing, and that is that the game must be played, and it is very risky to take everything for decided.

With this dialogue –which is not at all imaginary– I am trying to explain to you that it is very hard to find people who think that the PSOE will have any chance of forming a government after the elections. But almost everyone ends up saying that it is better to wait and not take any result for granted. Perhaps what is happening is that a certain image of Pedro Sánchez as the man of improbable miracles has been created. It must be admitted that, in the current situation, not even the track record of the socialist leader is a solid argument to doubt the next electoral result, because it is very difficult for the PSOE to appear at the polls pretending that it still has its credibility intact.

The wear and tear has been very strong. And to make matters more complicated, Sánchez has within his own party a center of opposition that often does not manifest itself openly in public, but that operates internally, in groups that meet periodically to criticize everything: the alliances of this legislature and the previous one, and the strategy that has been followed of building a wall so as not to speak with the PP, which, moreover, has not helped at all in opening channels of dialogue.

Elections without illusion

The outlook, I tell you, is quite sad. I mean that, unlike past –or perhaps remote– elections, now almost no one will go to vote with even a spark of enthusiasm. Even those who support the right-wing or far-right candidacies, supposedly enthusiastic about their prospects of victory, will not do so primarily with the conviction that their bet is for a new stage of prosperity and assured honesty in public management. The most important stimulus that has been set in motion –and not just now, but for years– to call for an alternation in the country's leadership is the appeal to bring down "Sanchismo" to repeal its laws and its idea of social and progressive politics.

There are many people who do not have a very defined ideological orientation and whose only expression is weariness with the current climate and a desire to change it to try something else, to give an opportunity to an alternative without really knowing where Spanish society will head. How far away –and not only because of the disappointment caused by the famous jewels– are the times when the expectation of victory –in that case of Zapatero– was manifested by some groups by arching their index finger over an eyebrow in a group. That rather childish way of participation and political support has been replaced by another type of action, which does not claim anyone, but rather centers its objectives on the destruction of the rival.

We shall see what happens in the next stage, if there is an alternation, because what we have known in other phases of the PP has not exactly been a commitment to rigor and maximum demand. This applies both to political leaders and to their families. The bar has been set quite high and the latest test has been the resignation of Montse Mínguez as spokesperson for the PSOE and as head of the PSC list in Lleida. Coherence between what is proclaimed and demanded and one's own conduct has always been required. But, in theory, based on the experiences of Sánchez's closest relatives, it will be necessary to verify if the option for responsibility extended to the relatives of public officials is consolidated, with the possibility that the errors of the former have as an effect the fall of the latter. In any case, in terms of housing, it is evident that we have gone very far in identifying the owner as an unscrupulous speculator. That said, what is not forgiven is preaching one thing and doing another. For Zapatero, more than the necklace and the bracelets, what has hurt him the most is the contradiction between this content of his safe and having said that being a socialist consists of having little and giving a lot.

There is also nothing gratifying in the spectacle that the left –called radical– has offered when it comes to drawing up candidacies and trying to present itself as an option to guarantee the firmest defense of a consistent social discourse. The process of dialogue to the left of the PSOE has been very similar to the famous night of the Titanic, when crew and passengers awaited the arrival of help from the ship Carpathia, which managed to save 700 people out of the 2,200 on board. In this case, I do not know what the number of leaders and voters saved from the shipwreck will be, but the fight to occupy a place in the lifeboats has been tremendous. I exclude Rufián, who already had a clear exit as spokesperson for ERC. But this same role would have been, in many phases, difficult to reconcile with membership in a governing body of the left at a state level. The discourse on regional financing, for example, is different with one hat or another. And I tie this to what may await Catalonia in the next legislature. The singular financing model is no longer even talked about. We say that the 'Procés' is in the past, but it seems to me that the recovered post-election normality will not be the most favorable scenario for the country's interests either.