The Andalusian campaign monopolizes the focus, but the parties have already begun to reorganize your internal structures to be prepared for a scenario that is no longer handled as a remote hypothesis, but as an operational reference: the coincidence of general and municipal elections on the same “super Sunday.” This requires being ready for the electoral programs and having the resources to be able to face this coincidence of polls in the best conditions. There is a coincidental analysis that is based on both the right and the parliamentary partners of the Government on the political situation of the President of the Government.
This diagnosis is based on a premise shared in both blocks: Pedro Sanchez is in a very deteriorated political position, with room to extend the legislature until it reaches its end, but with very little ability to mobilize his party to help him in an electoral event if he goes alone, and even more so if this happens after having taken their mayors to the scaffold in the municipal elections.
Sources from the right and from formations of the investiture bloc agree on the same reasoning. If the electoral calendar follows its natural course, and the municipal elections are held first, the effect would be counterproductive for the president.
“If he sends the mayors to the polls first and then he goes, the party will arrive devastated at the second meeting and without the desire to work for the cause of Sanchismo,” summarizes a leader with knowledge of these analyses.
The reading is that a first defeat or attrition at the local level would deactivate the subsequent mobilization in general elections, and with this hypothesis they are already moving to the right and the left.
In the PP they have shown their anticipation of this possible scenario with the decision that Alberto Núñez Feijóo visits all his regional barons and begins to collect “papers” and proposals for the preparation of the general election program.
In Genoa they value the possibility that Moncloa sets the objective of using the municipal structure as a drag and shielding element. Mayors, due to their proximity to the electorate and their territorial implementation, are a political shield capable of sustaining participation in an adverse moment. This logic, assumed in different political spheres, is what is already organizing the internal movements of the parties.
The immediate consequence is the activation of the electoral machines. Both in the Popular Party and in the formations that support the Government, preparation work will be intensified for a simultaneous campaign. Program teams, strategy managers and territorial structures must adjust their planning to a compressed calendar in which both elections would take place in parallel.
Coordination with regional and municipal structures is considered key to maximizing electoral performance.
In parallel, the Government introduces an additional factor in its calculations: the impact of the judicial calendar and, above all, the more than predictable bench of Begoña Gómez, unless the Provincial Court rectifies its previous pronouncements and overturns Judge Peinado’s intentions. According to Javier Portillo, analyzes are already being carried out in Moncloa on how the coincidence with a possible trial would affect a general election. These evaluations include media impact scenarios and their possible translation in electoral terms.
Government sources admit that this element adds uncertainty to the political calendar. The possibility that the judicial development coincides with the campaign introduces a risk that can affect the timing and strategy. In this context, the option of concentrating the elections in a single moment is also interpreted as a possible way to limit the political impact of that factor.
In any case, the result is a political system that has entered the total electoral pre-activation phase. The parties no longer work with an ordinary legislature horizon and this also affects the legislative calendar and, of course, the fact that it is not possible to have Budgets, even though the Government continues not to recognize it.
The result of the Andalusian elections will be decisive in the political context. They are decisive elections on the right and on the left because they will affect everyone’s national strategies. The PP does not claim victory, but the predominant feeling is that Juanma Moreno has real possibilities of repeating an absolute majority. Stability for Andalusia, but, above all, a “kick” to Vox, which would be out of the game in a community of maximum symbolism, and the last flying goal before the next national elections, the municipal ones, unless Sánchez alters the order of the general elections.
The socialists intend to survive with the mantra that the defeat has been contained, even if they lower their electoral ground to historic levels. The problem is structural because The Andalusian PSOE today has no leader nor a project.