Crisp and overheated campaign for Madrid elections: what’s going on in Spanish politics

The Madrid government’s election campaign on May 4 is overheating. A debate on SER radio ended with insults and three of the participants rising from their seats. The great Manuel Vicent, writer, journalist and commentator, said that the current political climate has become “An almost pornographic show because many sessions of Congress should publish them at three in the morning only for vicious ”. This is what breathes this fundraising campaign which ends up being a sample of what is happening nationally in Spain.

Again, this is a struggle between the left and the right, although these are very old definitions. On the one hand, the traditional conservatives of the Popular Party who now govern in a coalition with the extreme right of Vox and Ciudadanos – which in three years has gone from the party with the most votes at the national level to the definite possibility of running of any seat in the country, the legislature of Madrid. A social alliance similar to the one that supported Francoism for 40 years. On the other, the socialists of the PSOE in alliance with Más Madrid, the progressives who gathered around the former mayor Manuela Carmena, and the populists of United We Can. Poll projections indicate the possibility that the two coalitions could form a government based on the seat variations each party obtains. Much will depend on whether Ciudadanos center-right manages to exceed 5% of the vote to get at least two seats.

The average number of surveys updated daily by El País, gives the PP of the current head of the Madrid government Isabel Díaz Ayuso the most voted party (around 41% -42% of the vote), followed by the PSOE (23%) which leads Ángel Gabilondo as candidate, Más Madrid with Mónica García in third place (13% -14%), then the far right of Vox with Rocío Monasterio (9%), United We can , who is represented by Pablo Iglesias, who left the vice-presidency of the national government to play in the capital (7%) and Ciudadanos with Edmundo Bal (4%).

Try Vox nationalize the Madrid elections to make it a sort of referendum on how the government of socialist Pedro Sánchez handled the pandemic crisis. And you use clearly Trumpist tactics to get. And this is what was seen on Friday in what will be, perhaps, the last debate before the elections. Most of the candidates refuse to continue to confront their ideas with the aggressive leader of the far right. The atmosphere had been charged with political electricity for months and it exploded in the SER studio during the Àngels Barceló program. “The scene was unusual, even in a politics as tense as the Spanish one”, wrote the commentator of elDiario.es. Pablo Iglesias stood up angrily while Rocío Monasterio scolded him: “If you are so brave, get up and go out! Get out, that’s what many Spaniards want!”

And not happy with it, she caught it with the journalist moderator. “You are an activist!” he shouted at her. And when he saw that the journalist, almost at the studio door, had grabbed Iglesias by the arm to ask him to stay, Monasterio reprimanded him in an even louder tone: “But he grabs her hand!”

A little later, Iglesias was seconded by the two other left candidates. “His attitude is fascist”, The generally very moderate political veteran of the PSOE, Ángel Gabilondo, told Monasterio when he left the study with García. He was referring to the Monastery’s reaction of disbelief to Iglesias, after receiving on Thursday a letter with four bullets and an explicit death threat (Two others, almost identical, were sent to the Minister of the Interior and to the Director General of the Civil Guard).

The far-right monastery had achieved its goal. Vox must by all means balance the leadership that the president and candidate of the PP, Díaz Ayuso, has achieved in his political space. He had put on a “show” for his own audience. Party leader Santiago Abascal had already done so at the start of the campaign when he confronted protesters from anti-fascist groups in the popular district of Vallecas. It all ended with punches between activists on both sides and with the police. When the echoes of these altercations faded, Vox plastered metro stations with posters against immigrant minors.

After Más Madrid and Unidas Podemos announced that they would no longer be returning with Vox, debates scheduled for next week on TVE and La Sexta have been called off. The three left-wing parties called on the PP to explain whether this is the political formation with which it intends to form a majority after the May 4 elections. The first reaction of the most popular threw more gasoline on the fire. “Churches, close when you leave”, read a tweet from the party’s official account in the Community of Madrid which was deleted shortly after.

Iglesias, the former vice-president of the government with his characteristic long tail, went to lodge the complaint for death threats at the police station of the Congress of Deputies. With a gesture of regret, he lamented to journalists: “Now they don’t even call me ‘red shit’ anymore, now they call me ‘chepudo’ (hunchback) and ‘disgusting rat’. These are the same dehumanizing strategies that the Nazis used. Vox’s official Twitter account exuded euphoria. In a photo of Iglesias alone in one of the halls of the radio station, he said: “We have kicked him out of the SER debate and we are going to kick him out of Spanish politics soon.” And he again questioned the “alleged” death threats against Iglesias.

Commentator Borja Sémper believes that “in these elections, Madrid has become something more than a political playing field. They will define a large number of candidates for the national general elections“. According to demographic and economic projections, in 2030, Madrid will occupy nearly 40% of the Spanish GDP and will have around 9 million inhabitants, “and yet these very important contents are not distinguished between the noise and the fury of the electoral campaign” , he added. .

In any case, it will be the fourth regional elections held in a pandemic in Spain after the Galician, Basque and Catalan elections, and the first to take place in advance in the Community of Madrid, after the breakdown of the PP coalition government. and Citizens, two years after their training. In addition, they will be on a weekday, Tuesday May 4, which only happened in 1987. The pandemic and the working day could drastically reduce attendance at the polls. Fed up with insults and the deep political divide could do the rest.

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