The Andalusian PSOE wanted to show strength at its closing campaign rally in Seville. About 3,500 people, according to the organization, supported the candidate for the presidency of the Junta, María Jesús Montero, in her sixth event shared with the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez. The PSOE leader has been almost the main asset of the PSOE, along with former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
The PSOE wrapped itself more than ever in the green and white at its last event. For the first time in the campaign, the Andalusian anthem was played before the rally began. Montero insisted on denouncing the dismantling of public services in Andalusia and on Sunday she is betting everything on that card. “Vote public healthcare,” is her slogan. “There are more of us who defend public services, we are the majority and, if we vote, we win,” Montero repeated, to counter abstention.
Sánchez addressed the voters who supported him in the last general elections but who were not attracted by the socialist offer in the Andalusian elections. He asked them for consistency: “Come on, if you want a left-wing government, vote for the PSOE!”
The secretary general of the PSOE in Seville, Javier Fernández de los Ríos, also called for a final effort because neither “polls nor talk shows win elections.”
Montero thus ended a campaign with few public events. Her daily routine consisted of writing messages on social media, interviews, some meetings with groups, and an evening rally. There was no public exposure of the candidate nor did she deploy the classic PSOE campaign of asking for votes on the street, as other provincial list leaders did.
Some say that this decision was made to avoid the “risk” that, given the “climate of hatred,” some spontaneous person might heckle her and that incident would become the news of the day. “We played with that weakness and she was not exposed,” says a socialist leader who considers the decision “wise.”
But other sources point out that Montero — who believes she has done a “great campaign,” as she said today — has not shed the official suit she has worn for 24 years, since she was appointed deputy health minister of the Junta. From there she held the ministries of Health and Finance, the Ministry of Finance, the spokespersonship of Pedro Sánchez’s government, and the first vice presidency, positions she left when the Andalusian president dissolved the Parliament exactly 52 days ago. “She has not decompressed from Madrid,” highlights one of the sources consulted. “That process requires evolution and it has not happened,” says another.
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In these 15 days, the PSOE also suspended two days due to the death of two civil guards in an anti-narcotics operation on the coast of Huelva. There was also no agenda the day before the two televised debates on RTVE and Canal Sur, like most of the other candidates.
The PSOE has entered this campaign being aware for more than a year that the PP and Juan Manuel Moreno will win the Andalusian elections on Sunday. That was the reason they removed Juan Espadas from the general secretariat and chose Montero in an operation endorsed by Pedro Sánchez. The arrival of the former vice president stopped another crisis in Andalusian socialism, but it has not turned the PSOE into a winning project, a fact reflected in all the published polls.
Members and leaders have a strange feeling after these 15 days of campaigning. They do not see a climate of political change and doubt that they have managed to mobilize the 580,000 people who voted for Sánchez in 2023 but not for them a year earlier. “I don’t know what’s happening: the trackings [tracking polls of voting intention during the campaign] are so, so bad…, but the perception we get from the street is very receptive,” several leaders agree, who say the atmosphere now is better than in 2022 and 2018, when they lost the Junta.
A leader who defines himself “as a PSOE patriot,” says: “I don’t confuse wish with reality but, if there is monumental anger with healthcare, isn’t there going to be a protest vote? We paid for it in 2018 and Moreno didn’t? They already punished us well four years ago!” But no one is deceived, the PSOE’s goal is for Moreno to lose the absolute majority and for the socialist candidate “not to get fewer votes than Juan Espadas,” when they hit their electoral floor. Repeating 30 deputies as in 2022 would be considered a success. They trust in the miracle and the hidden vote in a party that used to leave few things to chance and started the campaign when the last one ended.
From the moment the results of Sunday are known, the PSOE will have to start thinking about the day after, in which some have been settled for a long time. Many leaders already warn that nothing will happen, there will be no upheaval. Whatever happens “will be after the cycle is exhausted when Pedro Sánchez calls general elections” in 2027.
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