José Manuel Orengo, a former socialist leader and now a refugee at the Baleària company, announced a few days ago when planning a campaign that a political organization had to decide what question to ask the voters. The entire electoral strategy will be framed around this question, and this question will determine the necessary dialogue between the candidate and his potential voters. Therefore, identifying what the problem is is the first step that is certainly necessary, if not possibly sufficient, to desire to win.
In the face of the regional elections to be held in the Community of Valencia on the last Sunday of May, together with the municipal elections, the PP’s question to the citizens is clear and direct: “Do you want to throw it? Sánchez from the Government?” . Carlos Mazón, the popular candidate for the presidency of the Generalitat, made it clear earlier this month when Ximo Puig signed the resolution to liquidate the Valencia Corts, placing the Community as the prelude to change. a national scale What Mazón stated in his institutional statement that day was that if someone wanted to change the Spanish Government, they had to change the Generalitat first; The sine qua non of replacing Sánchez with Feijóo is to put him in Palau first and get Puig out of there.
Stated this way, the question has clear advantages. Simple, concise. An effective discourse can easily get around it because it is closed: apparently, only two answers fit, either yes or no. Aware of the challenges his project still has to overcome in the majority of government, candidate Mazón is firing to rise, taking advantage of his national leader’s purported appeal, but above all the apparent rejection from President Sánchez. If the rhetoric PSPV wants to drive the campaign is that it’s between him and Puig, Mazón argues it’s about whether Sánchez should stay or be kicked out of La Moncloa, and positions the regional elections as primaries for that change. is to produce. “Today change begins in the Valencian Community and in Spain,” said the popular leader. One goes with the other. More clean water. The question has another advantage, and that’s the same as the question Vox posted. Eggs that do not fall into his sack can fall into the other sack with what? But in the end they both put the same basket together.
This does not mean that polling Mazón voters is not without risk. The first and most obvious is the devaluation of the essence of regional elections, turning them into a mere way station on the way to the end of what is apparently considered the most important stage, namely the election of legislative elections. will be held in December. In this sense, it is a serious contradiction that the PP candidate to head the Generalitat Valenciana goes to Madrid and declares with him that “the senyera will not bow to anyone because the Valencian people have their own identity”. The emphasis is on Valencia being the beginning of the Re-Conquest. A Re-Conquest in capital letters is determined by the State, not by autonomy. Also, clearly underestimating one’s own position from the point and time when the main candidate was the subordinate Mazón, who fought against Feijóo and Puig not to change this government, but above all to change that of the nation.
However, having said that, this is still a clever and likely to bear fruit Mazón’s strategy. If the PSPV has planned a campaign where the voter has to decide between Mazón and Puig, what the PP leader is trying to do is to break this framework proposed by the Socialists and question the voter in another way: Who? Do you like Feijóo or Sánchez? In trying to determine that, if the answer is they don’t want Sánchez then it’s not worth voting for Puig and you have to support him.
The question is, if the question Mazón was asking the voters when the elections were already held and on which he based his entire strategy was clear, then the question Puig sent him is a little more complex today. And therefore, much more risky. From what we’ve seen so far, the question will be whether the electorate believes that the Council chaired by Ximo Puig – Botany, depending on the day and time of the relevant declaration – is managing this Community well and therefore deserves to continue to govern. IT. The main problem is clear: the question is not closed. A voter can respond in the affirmative (“yes, I think the Community is well run”) and still vote for a change. Both things do not contradict each other.
But it is not just betting that is complicated for this. Also, as it requires “inclusion” (a verb my colleague from Levante Alfons García uses this week) by isolating the Community from what’s going on in Madrid. And it’s a tremendous effort, because Madrid is not just a black hole and a cursed sounding board, it’s also a guide for everyone competing in this campaign with North and Puig. Not just from Mazón’s right, or the extreme right of candidate Carlos Flores, imposed by Santiago Abascal, whose political activism in Valencia can be summed up in a few meetings and convictions of ill-treatment. Puig’s indispensable partners Esquerra Unida, Podemos and de Vox from Compromís, and from Mazón, where Yolanda Díaz’s intervening with Sumar forced them to act in the key of national rather than local politics. The addition could be a good maneuver in the face of the December elections, where the Spanish government is in danger. But all he’s done so far has been to bring anger and clamor to some of the regional governments with which he, paradoxically, does not compete. Baldoví attacks Podemos on the same days as Illueca disqualified Compromís. And the confusion is real: which campaign the vice president will support, the one from Compromís who attended his presentation, the one from Podemos, an entity to which he still belongs but has left him in the dark or not at all. risk appearing frivolous or irresponsible? Even though Esquerra Unida and Podemos have signed an agreement to march together, is it possible that they’re running the same campaign that’s overflowing with videos where Podemos accuses the US of being a “coward leftist”? How many components of the left abstain from each other in a campaign where the entire left agrees that its main enemy is demobilization?
Management, management, management. Until now, that was Puig’s mantra. Nor will anyone be able to say that it is not consistent with the performance that he has been trying to deal with people and things since his presidency, before prejudices and dogmas. But at the same time, Puig weakened his party to a degree never seen before, and now that monumental structure’s lack of lubrication is evident. And the confusion at this definitive stage of the electoral race among itself is vox populi. If everyone wins, it’s clear it’s because of him. But nobody understands, because Mazón made things so easy for them with those first “smile, they go” billboards, and stopped asking the questions they were waiting for. It wasn’t whether they wanted the government to continue, but whether the voters wanted the PP to return.