In these Andalusian elections held yesterday, everyone defied their expectations. Juanma Moreno’s was to maintain the absolute majority and repeat the mathematical miracle of 2022; Montero’s was to surpass the thirty deputies from four years ago. Neither of the two has been fulfilled.
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This noon the PSOE has called a press conference at its Seville headquarters in San Vicente where the campaign director, Fernando López Gil, will explain what happened.
Montero cleared up her political future this morning and said she will resign her seat as a deputy in Congress and will assume the role of leader of the opposition to Moreno’s government.
Juanma Moreno, for his part, should participate, as is tradition after elections, in the PP’s board of directors in Madrid and possibly in the afternoon, gather his people in Andalusia to share the bitter victory that will define the course of the next four years with Vox as a roommate in the San Telmo palace, the seat of the Junta government.
The boost from the Andalusian ‘cupaires’
There will be time to find out in detail what happened in these elections. Why in a syrupy campaign in which Moreno mainly tried not to activate the opponent’s electorate and in which Montero wanted to get her people on their feet, it ended up boosting a candidacy that did not even run in the 2022 regional elections, of a sovereignist nature.
Adelante is the Andalusian CUP. Their excellent result will not change the balance of power at all but sends two messages, the first confirms that the left continues to legitimize subdivisions – let us not forget that Adelante is a godchild of Podemos born in Cádiz – while the whole right obtains 58% of the votes, two points less than in 2022, but ultimately, it remains more convincing for the majority of Andalusians than the myriad of progressive projects.
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A mobilization that takes another path
The second message is that the reaction María Jesús Montero intended to promote against the corrosion of public service and Juanma Moreno’s neoliberal project has indeed managed to resonate with a part of the Andalusian electorate… who have chosen to promote a different political path.
It may seem anecdotal but in the 13 rallies María Jesús Montero held in this campaign, only in the last one was the Andalusian anthem played. It is an insignificant detail, yes, but perhaps the Andalusian Socialist Party should ask itself to what extent behind the defeats it has accumulated since 2018 – when it won but lost the government – it is paying for the renunciation of being the Andalusianist party championed by Rafael Escuredo, the first president of a Community who fought to be a historical community, on equal footing with Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia.
The pending accounts of Sánchez’s Government
And behind that perhaps also lies the impression that the central Administration has a lot of work to do in Andalusia in terms of infrastructure – trains, highways… – and that the Andalusian PSOE is not only there to electorally squeeze its lean cow from the south. It must assert itself and assert its autonomy.
The moderate path for Feijóo, blocked
Regarding the PP, the Andalusian path has been blocked and that is significant for the course Alberto Núñez Feijóo must follow until the Prime Minister decides to call elections. Moreno’s moderation in style – his political project is not very different from Ayuso’s, but his way of explaining it is – was an alternative path to the permanent turmoil of Madrid.
On Sunday, some Madrid newspaper already warned in its editorial line that Moreno’s “experiment,” his moderation, could not mean renouncing a frontal conflict with the socialist adversary.
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