All the electoral polls, including the CIS barometer, give the Popular Party an advantage, which continues to grow in the polls after its victory in the Andalusian elections. This will undoubtedly be the data that will mark the next political course, with the leader of the opposition, Alberto Nuñez Feijóo, convinced that he can win in the general elections, scheduled for December 2023 if Pedro Sánchez maintains his commitment to exhaust the legislature. It is foreseeable that he will do so, and that this pre-election expectation makes it difficult to reach state agreements such as those that Spain needs. Some of this has already happened, around some legislative initiatives, where the lack of dialogue by the Government, on the one hand, and the systematic refusal of the opposition, on the other, have prevented beneficial agreements for all. With some exceptions, such as the approval of a first anti-crisis package that saw the PP abstain, this has been the tone of recent months. Everything indicates that it will continue to be so and that Sánchez will continue to govern with the critical support of his investiture partners, without succeeding in attracting the opposition to his turf.
In this context, what are the possibilities of the President of the Government to finish the legislature and to take back the initiative that the polls deny him? Sánchez does not have it easy. Neither one nor the other. His main partners have no interest in breaking the deck before the count, which could take its toll on them in the face of a more than foreseeable victory for the right. They will most likely continue to pull on the rope, albeit without breaking it, assuming the cost of the noise with which internal struggles weigh down the work of the Government, but without assuming that of an electoral advance. The approval of an expansionist electoral ceiling, another upward revision of the minimum wage, and lto definitive processing of laws that are of particular importance for Podemos – democratic memory, Yes is yes, housing, etc. – should allow the coalition to be maintained until shortly before the elections, when everything will be much more fluid. The same can be thought of the agreements with the Esquerra Republicana, if the next meeting of the dialogue table that will take place in Barcelona does not shipwreck.
Sánchez’s intention to recover the initiative seems more tricky to us, taking into account thethe magnitude of the problems facing the Government. An inflation of 10.8% destroys any effort to contain the devastating effects of the crisis on the most disadvantaged sectors. Some of this has already happened in recent months and explains, to a large extent, the harvest of the PP in Andalusia and its good electoral prospects. Can Pedro Sánchez reverse this trend? Doing the same as up to now, it doesn’t seem like it. In view of his busy agenda for the next 18 months, everything indicates that he has more hopes for his international projection than for Spanish politics, dominated by confrontation and populism. The large energy projects negotiated with the EU, such as the gas pipeline that will take Algerian gas to Germany via Spain, are part of Sánchez’s initiatives, who seem to pin the hopes of recovering the PSOE on an intense European initiative that will culminate in the presidency Spain from the EU during the second half of 2023. Can an unfavorable electoral trend be reversed from foreign policy successes? Experience says quite the opposite, but it is also true that, never before, have our problems been so linked to the future of the European Union.