This election campaign has so far been a balm for the president of the Junta and candidate for re-election for the PP, Juanma Moreno. Until tonight’s debate broadcast by Televisión Española and directed by Xabier Fortes and Laura Clavero.
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Moreno has had to face criticism from opposition candidates, from PSOE, Vox, Por Andalucía and Adelante Andalucía, who have harshly reproached his public policy, especially regarding health and housing. The current president of the Junta has had many difficulties opening a breach in the bleak diagnosis made by the opposition and has often taken refuge in the folders full of papers he brought to his podium.
Moreno, in the golden minute, uses the opposition’s invectives to call for a stable government, away from the noise
He himself had predicted days earlier: this would be four against one. And it has been. In fact, in his golden minute, Moreno used this attack, at least coordinated by the opposition groups – at least those on the left – to ask for the absolute majority he longs for on May 17 and to avoid the “mess” of unstable governance.
Jorge Ignacio García, candidate of Adelante Andalucía, has been the most vehement in repeatedly demanding that President Moreno explain how the crisis of breast cancer screenings occurred, which has affected more than 2700 users of the public health system. A demand to which, to a greater or lesser extent, the rest of the candidates have joined without the president being able to weave a solid response. Moreno has promised in this campaign that in the next legislature he will undertake a thorough reform of the health system.
Montero reproaches the president for avoiding the debate on politics in Andalusia with his criticisms of Pedro Sánchez
María Jesús Montero, the candidate of the Andalusian socialists, who has made the solvency crisis of Andalusian healthcare the axis of her electoral campaign – it is the main problem Andalusians recognize in all surveys – has accused Moreno of avoiding the debate on the community’s problems _– “you do not want to be responsible for Andalusian politics” – when the president diverted the invectives that were launched at him in chorus by blaming Montero and Antonio Maíllo of Por Andalucía, integrated in Sumar, for the policies of Pedro Sánchez’s government.
He has resorted to that strategy at various moments, to the point of turning the dialogue into two: one, Andalusian politics, on which the left has focused, and two, criticisms of the central administration’s policy in which, this time, Moreno has had a squire, the Vox candidate, Manuel Gavira.
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García (Adelante Andalucía) accuses Montero of starting the privatization of healthcare when she was minister
The controversy of national scope has risen a few notches when, in the final moments of the broadcast, the reform of the financing model was addressed in which Moreno reproached Montero for having yielded to the “blackmail of the separatists.” Montero denied it and reminded him that the model project she left on the table of the Ministry of Finance foresees that Andalusia will be the community that “will receive the most money per inhabitant.” There Moreno was quick: “Mrs. Montero is the only one who believes that an agreement with the Catalan separatists will give more money to Andalusia.”
Antonio Maíllo, the candidate of Por Andalucía, has tried to make his way between the vehement candidate of Adelante Andalucía and María Jesús Montero, who has defended her management with more or less success when she was Minister of Health in Andalusia at the worst moment of the financial crisis against the accusations of Jorge Ignacio García who has pointed her out for having opened the door to the privatization of healthcare of which she now accuses President Moreno.
Maíllo has been especially critical of the education model of the Popular Party government and has highlighted the cost that vocational training courses currently have in a community with the highest youth unemployment rates in Spain.
The Vox candidate, Manuel Gavira, has joined the criticisms about the deficiencies of public services but unlike the rest of the groups his diagnosis is different: for him the cause of the deterioration of healthcare or the difficulties in accessing housing in Andalusia is immigration and, as expected, he has claimed his proposal to give priority access to services and aid to Spanish citizens ahead of those who live and work in Spain but do not have acquired nationality.
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