Once the electoral campaign is over and we have seen the latest polls that have inflated Vox while moving the PP away from the absolute majority, in Extremadura there are analysts who conclude that the still president and candidate for re-election, María Guardiola, made an error in calculation and diagnosis when last October she decided to advance the elections to this Sunday: she thought she would appease the PSOE, marked by the prosecution of its candidate, Miguel Ángel Gallardo, for the case of Pedro Sánchez’s brother, but she did not take into account that at the same time The electoral advance could favor the growth of the extreme right. And that would further complicate the governance of the region.
Guardiola’s objective by calling Extremadurans to the polls just two years after the last elections was precisely to stop depending on Vox. His announcement came after the extreme right presented an amendment to its entire Budget and after a short term in which the formation of Santiago Abascal conditioned all the legislative initiatives of the Board. Both parties have made no secret of their bad relationship in recent months.
This Sunday 890,967 Extremadurans have the right to maintain or change that scenario. It is in his power to fulfill Guardiola’s wishes to extend his advantage and even reach an absolute majority that will allow him to get rid of Vox or, on the contrary, reinforce the extreme right and force an agreement on the right. They can even give a left turn to Extremaduran politics, where the PSOE governed for 33 years. The socialists arrive at the polls marked by the prosecution of their candidate and are banking everything on a comeback – a scenario that the polls suggest -, while the candidate of Unidas por Extremadura, Irene de Miguel, has been gaining prominence as the campaign has progressed and, especially, in the three-way debate with PSOE and Vox that took place on Thursday on RTVE.
The main issues that have worried the parties in the last two weeks have been infrastructure, with a widespread demand for improvements in rail transport and connections in the region. The improvement of public services or social rights has also been on the table. The left warns of the risk of losing them in the event that Vox achieves more strength at the polls, and they remember that while the extreme right governed alongside Guardiola in Extremadura, there were setbacks in terms of equality, but also in public health and education along with memory policies. The extreme right has also managed to introduce the issue of immigration into the Extremaduran debate with its usual xenophobic proclamations, even though the region has the least migrant population in all of Spain.
The state context
The elections take place after a turbulent electoral campaign also marked by the state scenario. While the candidates were holding rallies and meetings with their militants, new accusations of sexual harassment came to light against leaders of the PSOE, but also of the PP, such as the latest case of the mayor of Jérica (Castelló), known this week. Just before the campaign, former socialist minister José Luis Ábalos and his main advisor, Koldo García, were placed in provisional prison, accused of collecting bribes for the awarding of public contracts. And the third protagonist of that same case, the former Secretary of Organization of the PSOE, Santos Cerdán, testified in the Senate on the last Monday of the campaign.
Also this week, on Tuesday, the Guardiola Government approved 41 measures in its last council, granting more than 165 million euros in aid and investments. This led the opposition to denounce a “non-compliance with the electoral law” by the PP Executive, which in recent weeks has been sanctioned up to three times by the Central Electoral Board for organizing visits and public events or making prohibited announcements during the electoral period.
Right in the final stretch, Guardiola’s campaign was disrupted by several sexist scandals that affected the Extremaduran president’s attempt to hunt down the female vote, when cases of harassment in the PSOE were rife. Late Wednesday, elDiario.es published the party’s attempts to hide the internal complaints of a councilor from Navalmoral de la Mata against the mayor, Enrique Hueso, of the PP, for “sexist treatment” and “abuse of power.” The audio that the PP’s regional spokesperson, José Ángel Sánchez Juliá, sent to the councilor, revealed on Thursday afternoon by elDiario.es, showed that the party leadership, both regional and provincial, knew of Hueso’s machismo and there was concern about how this matter could affect the party if it came to light.
“If they give us the label of sexist treatment, there will be a mess,” Sánchez Juliá warns at one point in the 21-second audio. The councilor had left the PP on December 2 after she did not receive a response to a letter sent to María Guardiola and the PP leadership in which she warned that she could no longer hold out and expressed her boredom at receiving delays in response to her complaints with messages such as: “Hold on”, “you know what Enrique is like”, “we will talk to him” or “we will take action”.
This case had been added to the one published early on Wednesday by El Plural: Guardiola’s until then driver, Daniel Ollero, who is also a relative of the Extremaduran president, had been convicted of sexist violence and appears in the VioGén system in which the names of aggressors and victims are registered. At the end of that same Wednesday, the Board reported that it had fired Ollero, although it said it was due to “mild coercion” against his ex-partner. The episode occurred eight months ago, so the opposition showed its perplexity at the fact that Guardiola did not decide to end his contract with the driver until it was published in the press.
The favorite candidate, with a low profile
Faced with these scandals, Guardiola opted for silence until Friday, when he said he was unaware of everything. He did not star in campaign events from Monday until Friday, when he did tour some of the most important towns in the region, both in Cáceres and Badajoz, in a strange closing event: a flamenco zambomba show in a public school in the capital of Badajoz. “What I see in this campaign, especially at the end of it, is a lot of nervousness and it is, of course, few values, few ethics, very dirty play,” he said.
What’s more, their strategy concluded by calling into question the democratic guarantees of the elections, just as the PP has done in each electoral process since Alberto Núñez Feijóo led the party. The PP leader encouraged the idea of the electoral coup because on Thursday, in a case that the Civil Guard itself described as “common crime,” some thieves stole a safe from a Post Office to keep the money, but inside it there were also 124 votes by mail that later appeared 20 kilometers away. Despite the evidence that the thieves were looking for the money and not the ballots, the PP spoke that democracy “is in danger” in Spain, although Correos specified that those 124 voters, belonging to the towns of Fuente de Cantos, Bienvenida and Calzadilla de los Barrios, will be able to vote again in light of what happened.
Feijóo, Miguel Tellado and Guardiola herself then launched themselves to encourage the pucherazo theory. “They are stealing democracy before our eyes,” he said, in a video on “There is no right for there to be people who cannot exercise their right to vote,” he insisted. In reality, all but two of those voters have already returned to vote.
However, no survey gives an absolute majority to the PP, which will once again depend on Vox if it wants to form a Government. In fact, Alberto Núñez Feijóo significantly lowered his party’s electoral ambition on Friday and set the PP’s goal of gaining more votes than the left. “We have the opportunity to fill the ballot boxes with enthusiasm and desire. Let no one stay at home because we are going to continue transforming Extremadura and we are going to do it together. I trust that work always gives results. And here the only thing we have done is work,” said Guardiola on Friday, in a very brief intervention during the flamenco zambomba in Badajoz, in a sports center that he could not fill and in which no leader of the state PP accompanied him.
The PSOE, for its part, has its candidate Gallardo prosecuted for prevarication and influence peddling and is awaiting trial for the hiring of Pedro Sánchez’s brother in the Badajoz Provincial Council. This situation could favor Unidas por Extremadura by gaining support from socialist voters.
At the end of the campaign in which, unlike Guardiola, he was supported by the leader of his party at the state level, the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, Gallardo asked to “raise our spirits to be able to trust and believe” in the “possibilities” of the PSOE. Before a dedicated audience in Viillanueva de la Serena (Badajoz), the town of which he was mayor for several decades, Gallardo defended the need to recover the region’s own voice. “That voice that Extremadura always had, the one raised by Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra and Guillermo Fernández Vara, the one that allowed us to be masters of our destiny and that was respected,” he said.
De Miguel, for his part, considered at an event in Badajoz that “not even a left-wing vote can stay at home” this Sunday, considering that Unidas por Extremadura has shown, in his opinion, that there is “an exciting project for the future” for the autonomous community.
Of the more than 890,000 Extremadurans with the right to vote, 30,608 reside abroad. In addition, the number of new voters who have turned 18 since the last elections in 2023 until now is 26,695 young people. As for the polling stations, there will be 1,401 (904 in the province of Badajoz and 497 in the province of Cáceres). In these elections, as on previous occasions, 36 deputies will be elected for the province of Badajoz, the most populated, and 29 for the province of Cáceres for the Assembly of Extremadura.
One of the keys to the day will be participation. The elections take place in the middle of Christmas, with the streets full of decorations and citizens doing their shopping and just one day before the extraordinary Lottery draw.
Source: www.eldiario.es
