The Andalusian elections confirm that the Spanish right is heading towards living within what Moreno Bonilla and Feijóo had insisted throughout the campaign they wanted to avoid: the mess (in the original version, el lío, a terminology inherited from Rajoy). The mess is having to govern with Vox, and that is exactly what the Andalusian PP will have to do in this new legislature, now that they have lost their absolute majority. In regional negotiations with the People's Party, Vox acts as a party that does not know the meaning of expressions like institutional loyalty or proportionality . Apparently, they don't even understand what negotiating exactly means: for Vox, there is only the possibility of imposing their slogans and ideological obsessions, or breaking the game. They are not government partners: they tutelage governments. Lately, Vox's slogan is called national priority, which means institutionalizing racism, supremacism, and xenophobia, and making them transversal elements in government action. After that, there follows a list of hatreds (feminism, environmentalism, etc.) at the top of which is the Catalan language and anything that Spanish far-right nationalism identifies as "catalan". This is "the mess" that Moreno Bonilla will have to face, who does not emerge exactly unscathed (5 fewer seats and loss of the absolute majority) from the scandal of breast cancer screenings, despite the fact that there were more than enough reasons for the wear and tear to be more pronounced.For its part, the question that the Andalusian PSOE can ask itself is whether it has already hit rock bottom and if it still has sheets to lose in future electoral washes. In hindsight, it is easy to say, but the truth is that the socialists could hardly have chosen a worse candidate than María Jesús Montero, a woman who is Andalusian by birth but who is little or nothing so in practice, much more linked to Madrid, to Pedro Sánchez and to the party apparatus than to Andalusian political discussion, which is intense, dense, and vibrant. The old tactic of sending politicians who have "succeeded" in Madrid as ministers to the "provinces" (Pilar Alegría to Aragon, María Jesús Montero to Andalusia), which has been used so many times by both the PP and the PSOE, interchangeably, is not yielding results for Pedro Sánchez.The significant rise of the sovereignist left Endavant Andalusia, led by José Ignacio García, compared to the blockage suffered by the Sumar, Podem, and Esquerra Unida coalition, Per Andalusia, with Antonio Maíllo as candidate, confirms that "what matters to people" is also ideological, and that sovereignism makes sense (and has voters) when it is presented as a form of democratic improvement, linked to the demands for the rights and freedoms of individuals, both individually and collectively. The fact that Endavant Andalusia has received more votes than Vox in constituencies like Cádiz or Seville is also relevant. By blocs, the right-wing parties total 68 seats, compared to 41 for the left-wing parties. The mess that we already know in the Balearic Islands or in the Valencian Country is beginning in Andalusia.

Andalusia is celebrating its thirteenth regional elections this Sunday, a series that began in 1982 and in which a solid socialist hegemony was maintained until Juanma Moreno Bonilla acceded to the Junta in 2018 hand in hand with Ciudadanos and Vox. In this last decade, Moreno Bonilla has built his own profile, different from the state PP, and especially different from the Madrid PP, based on moderation, good manners, and undisguised Andalusianism. In reality, it is a formula that recalls Pujol's Convergència, albeit without questioning the Spanish national project, and which is also practiced, for example, by the Galician PP and, to a lesser extent, the Balearic PP.

“My male friends lean to the far right, but women remain sensible”. This is what Andalusian poet Aurora Luque told the newspaper El País}, in the run-up to the Andalusian elections. Every election —and especially regional ones, where the relationship with the candidates is more direct— has its peculiarities. The current Andalusian president, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, came to the Junta in 2019, after 40 years of socialist hegemony. With a kind and unassertive style —far from the aggressive, fixed-agenda politics of Núñez Feijóo and his circle—, he has earned a certain respect that, in practice, translates into limited wear and tear, allowing him to attract votes beyond his usual base, both from the right (from Vox) and the left (from the PSOE itself). And this in a land that had been a socialist stronghold.