Smiling and confident, President Juanma Moreno’s face betrayed on Friday morning at his first campaign event in a neighborhood in the East district of Seville – middle class with a pool in the block – his conviction that tomorrow Sunday things will go between well and very well for him.
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The PP closes its campaign confident of a broad victory but without being able to take the absolute majority for granted
But it is striking that his team planned this event near the Palacio de Congresos, where in the afternoon the socialists closed their campaign in Seville – the province with the most seats at stake – and in which the PSOE Secretary General, Pedro Sánchez, participated again.
Coincidence? Almost nothing is in this very strange campaign in which there is a winner that no one disputes from the first minute, the PP, which, however, is not satisfied with the victory. It needs more. It needs an overwhelming victory.
The absolute majority is within reach, according to the polls handled by Juanma Moreno’s team, which give them between 56 and 59 seats.
With 55 deputies they would no longer need Vox in the Andalusian Parliament composed of 109 elected members. But the distribution of seats depends on the electoral arithmetic – the D’Hondt method – working in their favor in most of the eight provinces, and there are too many variables to be conclusive.
Sánchez, who has thrown himself into the campaign, asks those who vote for him to vote tomorrow for Montero
Moreno, and Feijóo himself in his parallel caravan, have put all their effort into renewing the absolute majority of 2022, when they obtained 58 deputies. Can the result be repeated? The bar is high. But anything else would be a failure, particularly for Feijóo. It would be another setback in what the party leadership sought when it organized this electoral train: to demonstrate that the PP can win and govern and can do so without Vox. So far it has not succeeded in three of the four elections. We will see what happens tomorrow.
Feijóo has made his own route of rallies, parallel to Moreno’s who has run a campaign basically centered on himself
Feijóo has made his own route through Andalusia, parallel to Moreno’s, who has gone his own way with a very personal campaign riding on his excellent rating, much better than Feijóo’s as a presidential candidate. The PP leader finished his particular circuit yesterday in Almería, a land fertile for Vox.
After Seville, the PP candidate, Juanma Moreno, traveled to Granada and ended the day in Málaga, the province for which he is running in the elections. There he no longer used the Catalan wildcard he has played all these days, although some of his supporters on the platform did. The “Catalunya ens roba ” has been a hit of this PP campaign. It remains to be seen how the moderate president of the Junta will be able to rebuild the bridges he has broken these days.
Moreno was the last to finish his campaign closing event in Málaga. Meanwhile, in Seville, the PSOE was already putting away chairs and dismantling for the last time the stage of the rally held in a room of the Palacio de Congresos where, for the fourth time, Pedro Sánchez spoke in this campaign.
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As in Andalusia, the PSOE Secretary General has not lent a hand in any of the electoral cycle venues that began in December in Extremadura and ends tomorrow here.
In this rally, which started, for the first time in this campaign, with the anthem of Andalusia, Sánchez asked those who vote for him in the general elections to cast their ballot tomorrow in favor of María Jesús Montero.
The request is entirely reasonable, because between the 2023 general elections and the regional elections a year earlier, there was a difference of almost half a million votes that now, according to the polls, do not appear.
Montero’s last intervention was somewhat melancholic: she admitted that Moreno’s song has prevailed more than her revolt
However, for those who have followed the electoral campaign, María Jesús Montero’s previous intervention was much more instructive because, perhaps intentionally, she already revealed what has failed or been lacking in her own campaign.
She implicitly admitted that her opponent, Juanma Moreno, has managed to set a framework in which her discourse on the defense of public services, especially healthcare, has barely managed to gain ground. And in part she is right: Moreno has managed to make the tone of his campaign more popular than any of his proposals. Montero’s intervention, without notes on the platform, was somewhat melancholic although, as always, at the end of her speech she finished with her usual “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” with both fists clenched and raised. Montero is a strong woman.
In Seville, the other three political forces with chances of obtaining representation in the Andalusian Parliament on Sunday also closed their campaigns. Vox, led by Santiago Abascal, returned, of course, to the national priority, which must be admitted, has been another of the frameworks in which the Andalusian campaign has developed despite the fact that, except in some provinces like Almería and Huelva, the presence of foreign workers on the street is more an exception than a rule. We will see how the party’s bet works, which, it should not be forgotten, started its institutional life in the Andalusian Parliament in 2018.
Also in Seville, the candidacies of Por Andalucía and Adelante Andalucía closed. If the PSOE, as it seems, collapses, they could be the big beneficiaries. But their results will not change the combination of Andalusian politics for the next four years in any way.
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