Threats against the PSOE and Podemos tighten the cha …

From Madrid

In any other situation, the victims would have received unanimous support from across the political spectrum and the condemnation of the threats would have been emphatic. But it’s been months, maybe years, that Spanish democracy has lost the climate of coexistence and respect for democratic values shared that he knew how to build after Franco died in 1975. The fight is now in the face of a dog and there aren’t a few who fear it will get worse.

The elections in the Autonomous Community of Madrid, unexpectedly triggered by President Isabel Díaz Ayuso (People’s Party), worked like the fuse that lit the powder keg. In recent weeks, there have been episodes that have gone beyond the usual verbal abuse on social media: the emergence of a cat of retired officers in which they proposed to shoot 26 million Spaniards (half of the population), the placement of an explosive device which caused fires at the headquarters of Podemos in the city of Cartagena (province of Murcia) and clashes between the police and anti-fascist demonstrators concentrated to protest against the holding of Vox’s acts in working-class neighborhoods were the most important, but not the only ones.

Last week, this wave of bullying surged forward. Podemos chief Pablo Iglesias and two senior socialist officials – Interior Minister Fernando Grande Marlaska and Civil Guard Director General María Gámez – received envelopes with intimidating messages and a disturbing addition: bullets from weapons of war. If the episode itself was worrying, the political reactions were more so. On the left, there was a tightening of ranks and solidarity with those who were threatened; on the right, the sentences were lukewarm or nonexistent. The majority did not go beyond general declarations condemning all types of violence.

The debate that was not

Last Friday, an electoral debate took place, in which candidates from all political forces except the Popular Party took part, whose head of the list and favorite in the polls, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, refused to participate. Before we start, Pablo Iglesias, that he left his post as vice-president of the government to lead his party list and avoid the electoral disaster announced by the polls, he asked that the threat he had just suffered be condemned. Candidate Vox, the far-right force that aspires to enter the government of Madrid if Díaz Ayuso does not get enough votes to govern alone, refused to do so and questioned the veracity of the complaint. Iglesias. The Secretary General of Podemos rose from the table but not before leaving a message to the rest of the candidates and to media officials, including the radio station where the conference was scheduled: “Democrats cannot whitewash the far right, legitimize them by sitting down with them. I think more and more people are realizing that democracy is under threat. ” A little after, the other left-wing candidates, who clearly advance Iglesias in the polls – Ángel Gabilondo (PSOE) and Mónica García (Más Madrid) – have also left the debate, which ended shortly after startup. From that moment on, the electoral campaign, which still has a week to go, saw the gulf between the two ideological options widen.

While the left warns against the danger of normalizing the messages of the extreme right – which is the axis of the xenophobic attacks against the “ menas ” (unaccompanied minors), immigrant minors who arrive in Spain from the African coasts and are greeted by the public institutions and those who accuse of having committed crimes – from the right and its media terminals assure that the rarefied Spanish democracy did not come with Vox, but with Podemos, which imported the “ escraches ” to rival politicians and other hitherto unknown practices. With each warning from the left of the danger of not isolating the far right, as happens in other European countries, it is reminded that Pedro Sánchez accepted the approval of the budgets with Bildu, the force Basque separatist who occupies the political space of those who in their time supported the defunct ETA, and the government is qualified as “social-communist”.

This Monday, we learned that a fourth was threatened. Socialist Minister of Trade, Tourism and Industry Reyes Maroto received an envelope containing a bloody razor. The investigation to find the sender was faster than in the other cases. Hours later, police arrested a neighbor of El Escorial who, according to official sources, suffers from serious psychiatric problems. A sign of the irrational tension that a country that until recently was taken as an example of a mature and advanced democracy seems to be experiencing, the conservative newspaper The world He headlined on the cover with a photo of the threatened minister: “PSOE campaigns with threat of schizophrenic”.

Although these are the elections where the government of the country’s political epicenter will be elected, the elections, which will take place next Tuesday, must nonetheless elect a regional government. However, the parties saw it as an all or nothing battle. Not only because they can mean the entry for the first time of the far right into a government – in the decentralized Spanish state, the autonomous communities have competences as relevant as health, education, social affairs or spatial planning – but because From the results obtained, it will be inevitable to draw conclusions that can be read in a national key.

With 6.7 million inhabitants, Madrid is the third most populous region in Spain, only behind Andalusia and Catalonia, and is the undisputed economic center of the country. The president and re-election candidate has been characterized for two years in the regional government by an ultra-liberal policy of tax cuts and privatization and has managed the pandemic by opposing the policy of restrictions promoted by the central government . , This has led to an increase in popular support despite Madrid having several of the worst indicators linked to the pandemic.

Díaz Ayuso has ruled for the past two years in alliance with Ciudadanos – a liberal formation in a clear process of disintegration – and lost confidence in his partners after learning that they were conspiring to oust the PP from the government of Murcia. For this reason, and perched on polls that predicted a comfortable victory, she called for early elections amid the pandemic.

A week before the date of the elections, the right-wing bloc, formed by the PP and Vox, retains an advantage over the left -PSOE, Más Madrid and Podemos-, even if the progressive sectors assure that everything has not been said yet . They argue that if they manage to increase turnout in lower-income neighborhoods and municipalities on the outskirts of Madrid, they can reverse the polls. It won’t be easy. Contrary to Spanish democratic tradition, Ayuso called the elections for a Tuesday, a weekday.

Regardless of the outcome, the gap that continues to open each day will continue to be present once the count is over.