San Salvador/Finally, after breaking all records of political audacity, the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, made the decision to dissolve the Cortes and call elections for the last days of next November. The fragmentation of his indigestible coalition of parties, formed in 2023 against the grain of the voters’ decision, finally collapsed under the overwhelming weight of reality.
And the thing is that, when you look at it, it didn’t matter any more. Sánchez’s great betrayals, accumulated on the spine of the country, have ended up producing the break that threatens his continuity in the Moncloa Palace. If persistence is already tiring, the infamous contumacy in power can only produce disgust.
The ruling Spanish Socialist Workers Party (Psoe) now has all the polls against it. The abrupt entry of tens of thousands of Moroccans into Ceuta a few months ago complicates the electoral panorama as much as the undeniable housing crisis could do, dramatically humanized by the case of an elderly woman, Maricarmen Abascal, who was forced to leave her Madrid apartment at the age of 87.
The President of the Government would like these ugly issues not to affect him, but that is impossible after eight years of stubborn persistence in the same chair.
The President of the Government would like these ugly issues not to affect him, but that is impossible after eight years of stubborn persistence in the same chair. Today Pedro Sánchez suffers the direct consequences of his own way of approaching politics as an art of mere survival.
The affordable housing mess, at least in Spain, has been affecting the middle class for a long time. Trying to hold the opposition responsible for this delicate issue is another of the acts of sleight of hand that citizens no longer seem willing to tolerate from the Psoe.
The same thing about Ceuta. The Government lacks the moral authority to wriggle out of a problem that has been aggravated by its negligence and, at times, by its actions. Sánchez has procrastinated with the situation in Morocco as much as he wanted, at the same time promoting an inconvenient agenda of mass immigration regularization. Such inconsistency, at any border point, was going to explode sooner or later.
Added to the previous crises is a string of corruption scandals that have already put several Psoe leaders behind bars, including two of the highest officials in the party structure. The network is a pestilential mix of rigged contracts, influence peddling, million-dollar ransoms, taking advantage of health emergencies and mafia attempts to obstruct justice. As has already been pointed out in this column, the legal involvement of former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in several of these collusions only confirms the transnational nature of the corrupt ecosystem installed in Spanish politics.
With so many fronts open at the same time, Pedro Sánchez has believed that perhaps his only opportunity to avoid total disaster is to bring forward elections, hoping that the social mobilization for housing evictions will allow him to disguise himself as indignant and before the courts, agglomerating witnesses and defendants, continue to expose the official rot with headlines.
The hunger for solutions will remain unabated, along with the continuous demand for intelligence and creativity to define those solutions, seek the necessary consensus, avoid the foreseeable pitfalls and execute the consequent applications.
But all of the above, while explaining the collapse of the Psoe, also shows the overload of poison injected into its political heritage. Thanks to not having fixed a single one of Spain’s great problems, the eight years of sanchismo They have managed to make things worse to the point of bordering on the limits. If Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the Popular Party, manages to form a government by joining forces with Vox, that ultra-conservative formation, what will reach his hands will be a bunch of time bombs. Nobody will give him a break.
The losers of November 29, in addition, will be in charge of keeping the streets lit, stretching to the maximum that anger that the Spanish are beginning to express. Because, as we already know, the public square becomes the office of the socialist evicted from power; Destabilizing is the main of its tasks when it has lost, due to ineptness, the responsibility of governing.
Meanwhile, the hunger for solutions will remain unabated, along with the continuous demand for intelligence and creativity to define those solutions, seek the necessary consensus, avoid the foreseeable pitfalls and execute the consequent applications. Because the country’s debt will continue to skyrocket, the need for housing will continue to be high and the boiling will continue for some time in the border enclaves with Morocco.
And other atavistic issues, such as regional struggles, will once again demand attention. Don’t forget that nationalism, in the words of journalist Alfredo Urdaci, “is like the lion: the only way to satisfy it is by letting it eat you.”
But returning to the muddled Pedro Sánchez, there is no doubt that his calculations go beyond the next elections. He urgently needs to remain the undisputed leader of a future opposition committed to turning the government step of the PP and Vox into a failed parenthesis. Even that, however, could go wrong – in fact, quite badly – if the polls were to confirm the enormous rejection that opinion polls spit on him today.
