All the polls, including the latest published this Tuesday by the Andalusian Studies Center (Centra), dependent on the Presidency Department, give the victory in the Andalusian elections to the president of the Junta and PP candidate for re-election, Juan Manuel Moreno. In all the surveys, the Popular Party is close to an absolute majority, but the difference between the 55 seats that grant it and the 54 is decided by a handful of votes. The conservative leader’s campaign team studies every day how four deputies swing or not in their favor. One of the key provinces to tip the result is Granada, as Moreno himself acknowledged this morning, and in that province he has planned an intense agenda to defend a management that was blurred on Monday, during the debate, against the rest of the opposition candidates. “It was a rushed debate, with many interruptions and little time, with a common denominator: all against me. They spoke four times and I could only reply once,” he defended himself.
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To get those few votes where the absolute majority is at stake, Moreno will not move from his strategy of “stability or chaos” and he framed yesterday’s debate in that “chaos.” “What was projected is the chaos: candidates lying, interrupting each other, lack of correctness…,” Moreno said after visiting the Almuñécar market. The Popular leader wanted to position himself at the opposite end of his political adversaries. “There are two models, the one without ambition, the one of compromise, the one of those who united yesterday: Por Andalucía, Adelante Andalucía, Andalucía to the left to the right, plus the PSOE, and the serious and rigorous model,” he said, then concluding: “Real Andalusia is in one place and the imaginary in another, that’s why the polls don’t match.”
He also attacked the Socialist candidate, María Jesús Montero, whom he accused of being “part of the left installed in lies,” to reiterate some of the arguments he opposed to her during Monday’s debate, such as the number of agreements or the Court of Auditors’ report stating that her time as Health Minister was when the least was spent on healthcare. These are two examples that, as he acknowledged, went unnoticed in the RTVE debate and that is why he took the opportunity to relaunch them a day later along with the claim that the PSOE: “Denies reality and bases the campaign on a big lie,” to delegitimize their strategy based on defending public services and attacking the Junta’s management.
Moreno appealed to the good employment figures and the reduction in unemployment announced this Tuesday to also reinforce another of his key ideas: the economic locomotive that Andalusia has become since his arrival at the Junta. The criticisms of his political adversaries and the insistence on appealing to the useful vote —“Everything seems to indicate that I will be president again, the question is whether alone or accompanied. Alone we can walk faster, freer and more efficiently,” he maintained— have distorted the batch of electoral promises he launched this Tuesday: a sustainable irrigation law and a regulation to reorganize and simplify administrative procedures in water management.
Unlike previous days, where announcements were made in somewhat bleak locations, the scenery has changed. His first act of the morning was supported by leaders and supporters in Almuñécar; he is also scheduled to visit a horticultural cooperative in Motril; the metro expansion works in Churriana, ending with a rally in Granada.
The PP dominates the comarca of the Granada Tropical Coast, where Almuñécar and Motril are located. Granada is one of the provinces where Moreno’s party could gain a deputy; that is why Moreno has worked hard to mobilize his voters and has gotten excited: “There is one less day left to continue governing for Andalusia and also one less day left for someone who is in Madrid at La Moncloa and who does not help us at all.”
