The best thing about democracy is that Even if you have all the money in the world, you cannot know who will win the elections in Andalusia this Sunday.. We can put the word science next to the word politics as many times as we want, but that does not change reality: today’s voters are not those of four years ago (some have turned 18 and others have died), people decide individually their vote and they can even change it at the last second due to the many polls they have answered and, even more so, when they leave school they can declare that they have voted for something different from what they have voted for. But, the electoral results change everything, nothing in Spanish politics will be the same after nine o’clock tonight. That is why, for months before the elections, the parties shy away from any decision that could leave them with a changed step. And that is why they spend hours and hours speculating about possible scenarios. In this case, they vary depending on three large variables: the fate of the Ciudadanos votes, the correlation of forces between PP and Vox and the weighting of votes between Yolanda Díaz and Podemos. So this article, more than any other, has its hours counted: after nine o’clock on Sunday night it is no longer useful for anything.
The PP, on the verge of an absolute majority
The most managed scenario is that the PP of Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla is close to the absolute majority. This would endorse the bet of Alberto Núñez Feijóo who, in fact, assaulted Madrid doing tandem with the Andalusian and what it means: no revenge with socialism, swallowing Ciudadanos and no trying to be more cañí than Vox as Isabel Díaz Ayuso does. It would be the consolidation of the so-called Feijóo effect because it would give rise to a municipal campaign in 2023 recovering the hegemony on the right from the center and opposing his project to that of Pedro Sánchez’s PSOE conditioned to the populism of Podemos. And it would be the worst scenario for the PSOE because it would mean that the vote that went to Ciudadanos fleeing the troubles of 2018 has ended up in the PP instead of returning to the center-left fold. All the barons and mayors of the PSOE will start the calculator to see the impact of this transfer in their house and they can get more nervous with Sánchez than their namesakes from the PP got with Pablo Casado when, after the elections in Madrid and Castilla -La Mancha, did the same by observing the passage of votes from Ciudadanos to Vox without stopping a legislature in the PP. And, in addition, this scenario destroys the mantra that Moncloa emits: Sánchez or Vox.
Instead, if the PP needs the affirmative vote of Vox because it does not get more deputies than the whole of the left, then things get ugly for Feijóo that appears as a simple crutch of the extreme right that in this cycle would be the emerging force. Falling into the arms of Vox would leave the PP in a very bad place in Europe and the only viable way out for it would be to demand the abstention of the PSOE, as it has already done in the final stretch of the campaign. But that would come at a price: abstention in Andalusia may imply supporting the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) and the Constitutional Court and even the vote in favor of the scissors that the EU will demand in the last quarter to save the Spanish debt. That link with the PSOE in the middle of the municipal campaign may be unacceptable for the PP because it would leave too much space to its right for Vox and it could be the case that with the PSOE of the crepuscular Sánchez or fled to Europe they would not even add up.
The PSOE gains weight on the left
It is, at this time, the most unlikely scenario. Juan Espadas has made a correct but late campaign. Sánchez was slow to finish off Susana Díaz and what now seems more like the epilogue of the previous stage than the prologue of a new one. With everything, the courtyard to your left is even busier than to the right and in the penultimate announcement of the addition of Yolanda Díaz, what has occurred is a division with a kind of Cadiz cantonalism that could displace the vote to the PSOE. It would be good news for Sánchez but, facing the next electoral cycle, it would corner him to the left until he won in many towns but without a partner to get a majority. And he would distance him from that Europe he dreams of.