The end of Sanchismo and the return of Francoism

BarcelonaThe concept of a 'cycle change' is often trivialized, especially in the sports press. But with the data from the YouGov poll for November 29th at hand, what is approaching is a genuine cycle change with a prominent protagonist: the far-right of national-Catholic roots, Vox. With this result, Alberto Núñez Feijóo would become the weakest leader to ever reach the Moncloa Palace politically, discredited by the polls (17 fewer seats) and with an adversary eating into his ground on the right. Needless to say, this would have internal consequences, where doubts would multiply about a figure who has not known how to take advantage of the years in the opposition to strengthen himself, and with Isabel Díaz Ayuso sharpening her knives.

On the other side, with 104 seats, Pedro Sánchez would only have one possible path: withdrawal. If 'Feijóoism' would be bruised, 'Sanchism' would be directly sunk. With the difference that Feijóo would have a second chance at the Moncloa to try to recover and leverage all the levers of power to project himself as the great leader that, right now, not even his own side sees. The PSOE would, without any doubt, enter a kind of existential crisis that the, let's say, more Jacobin and Spanish nationalist sectors would take advantage of to try to bury the legacy of Sanchism and return to the Felipist order.

With 19 seats, the Broad Front would have saved the furniture, which, added to the strength of the sovereignist left (ERC, Bildu, the BNG and, in part, Compromís), would form a powerful group to the left of the PSOE. Territorially, Catalonia and the Basque Country (along with Navarre too) would remain as a progressive island in a blue and green sea, awaiting municipal and regional elections that could close the cycle of dominance of the right and the far right or start to open some cracks.

The magic number: 192 seats

In any case, the figure to keep in mind here is 192, which is the sum of the PP and Vox, and which is 16 seats above the absolute majority. With this result, the right would not be able to make constitutional changes, it is true, but it could impose a parliamentary steamroller so broad that it would allow them to apply their program almost without restrictions. Everything that requires only an absolute majority in Congress, they will do: laws, investigative commissions, debates, changes in public bodies, appointments, etc. The difference with other historical contexts is that this time we would not be facing a normal political alternation between left and right in Spain, but rather that what arrives in power in Madrid is a right-wing highly conditioned by the far-right, from which it has adopted a good part of the discourse, and with an undisguised spirit of revenge against the left. The resentment harbored over these years, and which has crystallized into an unprecedented polarization of political life, would now be put into practice to dismantle not only specific policies, but conquered rights such as euthanasia, and to enter fully into the cultural war with issues such as feminism, historical memory, and the most rancid Spanish nationalism. Hence the change of cycle we mentioned at the beginning. The end of Sanchismo would coincide with the return of explicit Francoism to the government.

Be that as it may, this is just a survey that portrays the situation at a particularly bad moment for the PSOE, which is the exact moment following the Urda accident, and therefore there are reasons to think that things could move during the campaign. It is difficult for them to move in the direction of benefiting the right even more, which has a highly mobilized electorate, and therefore there are reasons to think that the difference between the two blocks could shorten and that these 192 could be fewer in the end. But what this survey discards, just like most of those that have been published except for the CIS one, is a turnaround that would avoid a PP-Vox government. The unknown, therefore, is no longer who will win but the magnitude of their victory.