It was foreseeable. For days now, the script of a strictly regional campaign – from Andalusia and for Andalusia – initially designed by the team of the current president of the community and candidate to renew the position for the third time, has been changing course and increasingly approaching a broader battle.
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Juanma Moreno took a step further yesterday when, in an interview granted to the Ser Andalucía Centro radio station, he was asked what could happen if the PSOE collapses below its flotation line, the thirty deputies it secured in the last 2022 elections in Andalusia. The candidate predicted that maybe if María Jesús Montero’s candidacy loses five deputies, maybe, maybe, the Prime Minister would be forced to call elections because there would be a rebellion within the socialist party.
Sánchez will close the campaign with Montero in Seville, Moreno has decided to finish the job without Feijóo
Moreno is probably not the most qualified to know what will happen in the socialist party and none of this is in the Prime Minister’s plans, who is willing to sustain the legislature until the last minute, but for the Popular Party candidate it is convenient to broaden the scope of Sunday’s vote for two reasons: because he will win – whether he achieves an absolute majority is another matter – and because with this political gambit – vote for me and we will oust Sánchez – that he outlined yesterday, he tries to convince voters who want to punish the head of the Executive to vote for him, not for Vox. The ultranationalist party remains at the end of the corridor, despite its candidate, Manuel Gavira, barely making it for this battle as was shown again in the second electoral debate on Monday night.
Some sparks still flew from the debate yesterday. The parties made the appropriate cuts of the opponent’s interventions to attack him. The socialists reproached Moreno for bringing the Adamuz accident, in which 46 people died, to the television studio. The disaster, which apparently had been an example of good collaboration between institutions, has now become a stone to throw at the opponent.
The mayor of Adamuz himself, from the until now heroic town that first attended to the victims, Rafael Moreno, a socialist member, called a press conference yesterday in front of the Andalusian parliament to condemn President Moreno for “using” the victims in the electoral battle.
This was not the only clip that the parties capitalized on the next day. The PP extracted a statement from the socialist candidate in which she described the death in the collision of two Civil Guard boats during an anti-drug operation off the coast of Huelva as a “work accident,” something that, by the way, Antonio Maíllo from Por Andalucía also maintained. Yesterday, the PP furiously sent its candidate for Cádiz and Moreno’s trusted man, Antonio Sanz, demanding an immediate retraction from the socialist candidate. And she got it: Montero, before lunchtime, sent a message on her social networks saying that “of course we are talking about deaths in the line of duty, that is how we feel and that must always be recognized.”
There are three days left for the campaign to end, and it continues to get muddled. Tomorrow the Prime Minister will be in Pulianas, a municipality in Granada, and on Friday he will close the contest alongside Montero in Seville.
Feijóo points at Zapatero, one of the main promoters of María Jesús Montero’s campaign
On the other hand, Moreno, perhaps due to that original purpose of running a campaign at home and for the locals, has decided to close the electoral race alone, without Feijóo who, however, will continue holding rallies in the towns of Andalusia. Yesterday he attacked President Zapatero after a timely report about an alleged judicial investigation against him was published. Zapatero has been one of the main agitators of Montero’s campaign. So it was his turn to receive.
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