Pedro Sánchez and Juan Lobato at the last PSOE Regional Congress in Madrid JUAN BARBOSA
Once again the Madrid City Council is giving the PSOE a headache. And thus also for Pedro Sánchez. Ferraz has decided to postpone the first trial until December to settle the question of who will lead the Socialist candidacy in its search for a powerful candidate to try to establish right-wing hegemony in the Spanish capital for more than three decades end, with the exception of the legislature in which Manuela Carmena was mayor.
The PSOE primary calendar considered two options: celebrate the internal process now in the month of October, or leave it for the end of the year. The decision to postpone the trial brings with it an imminent fact: Mercedes González will not run, according to various socialist sources. The government delegate expected to introduce herself but had not done so and was awaiting the support of the governor and the secretary general of the PSOE. After all, it wasn’t like that. One of the reasons would be the low level of awareness among the citizens and the bad feelings that some internal qualifications had left the party. Socialist sources point out that the proposal to look for another alternative for the candidacy came from the Secretary General of the PSOE in Madrid, Juan Lobato, who gave the green light to Ferraz. González is the current general secretary of the city of Madrid, which includes the format of the old socialist district groups that was in place until a year ago.
In Ferraz and La Moncloa, they believe that the mayor, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, is showing signs of wear and tear and that the conditions are there for a U-turn in the capital, with all the importance it would mean for the left, and even more so in front of the General elections at the end of 2023. But for this they had to explore a different candidacy than González. Ministers Margarita Robles (Defence) and Pilar Llop (Justice) were expelled. “Let’s go for everyone. We don’t give up any city: neither Madrid, nor Barcelona, nor Valencia…”, Sánchez reiterated in an interview on September 1 on Cadena SER, in which he stressed that one of his electoral objectives was “to convince citizens that socialist governments in city councils and autonomous communities guarantee that there are policies favorable to the majority of citizens”.
This is the main novelty of the main calendar that the PSOE intends to detail this Thursday morning in the areas and localities with more than 20,000 inhabitants. Lobato, who clearly ran for the regional elections, will be elected by the militancy in the October 9 primaries. On the other hand, the president of the community, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, is seeking re-election. The Social Democrats hope to replace More Madrid as the main opposition party again, benefiting among other things from the fact that regional elections coincide with local elections. They also hope to salvage disgruntled voters with the shortages of basic services, overcrowded health centers and the controversial student grants awarded by the state government for incomes over €100,000.
The search for an option other than that of the government delegate in the Madrid City Council is reminiscent of the election of the PSOE candidates in the capital in the last electoral processes. After unsuccessfully courting party officials like Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, in 2019 Sánchez settled on Pepu Hernández, former national basketball coach and 2006 world champion. The bet was a complete failure: the Socialists signed their worst result in the capital ( 13.5% of the vote) and dropped to fourth place, beaten by Más Madrid, the PP and Ciudadanos. The PSOE won the regional elections for the first time since 1987 with Ángel Gabilondo as group leader. The Ciudadanos pact with the PP prevented a progressive government for the first time since 1995.
Sánchez faces the risk of concentrating external criticism and criticism from the socialist federation to which he belongs, which has a reputation for being the most spasmodic of the PSOE, if the result in the city of Madrid is not good. Pepu Hernández’s precedent is there and it’s very recent. But the current prime minister is not the only one who has tried to win back capital by recruiting candidates from outside the party or Madrid politics. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero imposed Trinidad Jiménez in 2003 – a year before he arrived in La Moncloa – to try to end the PP’s 14-year hegemony in the Spanish capital. Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón (PP) got 51.3% of the votes and 250,000 votes more than the Socialist candidate -36.68% and 625,000 votes – although Jiménez surpassed Fernando Morán’s votes (535,000) in 1999. In 2007, Zapatero again pushed through his own candidate, Miguel Sebastián, whom he would later make minister, against Ruiz-Gallardón. Sebastián worsened the results with 30.9% of the vote, almost 400,000 votes below the PP candidate. Sebastian stayed at 485,000 votes. The socialist bleeding continued in the 2011 election – Jaime Lissavetzky fell to 364,600 votes – and Antonio Miguel Carmona in 2015 (250,000 votes). If the result was already low, it went down with Pepu Hernández (224,000 votes). The prospective PSOE candidate faces the challenge of reversing a trend that dates back to the turn of the century.
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