Pedro Sánchez today has even tighter control of all the PSOE’s levers than he did just a few weeks ago. In the midst of a ‘renewal’ operation of a good number of territorial leaderships for the next electoral cycle, the general secretary of the socialists and president of the Government has deployed several of his ministers to key federations, some of whom are part of its core closest of trust in Moncloa. In the process, it has cleared some baronies of voices that had become fractious without even facing primaries. And in others, like Aragón, it fights to achieve it.
The list is long. The first vice president and Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, landed this week in Andalusia, where she will be acclaimed as general secretary after Juan Espadas steps aside. Something similar happened in December in the PSOE of Madrid where overnight Óscar López, former chief of staff of the president and Minister of Digital Transformation, became Madrid’s autonomous leader without having to submit to the validation of militancy and after the derailment of Juan Lobato.
The primaries were also aborted just a year ago in the Valencian Community to clear the way for Diana Morant, who disembarked from the Council of Ministers to succeed Ximo Puig after her competitors withdrew. The head of Territorial Policy and former Canarian president, Ángel Víctor Torres, has not even left his organic responsibility because he will run again in 2027 against Fernando Clavijo. And the Government spokesperson was entrusted with the most complicated mission: to fight a duel with the ‘right hand’ of Javier Lambán to evict the most explicit internal opposition of Pedro Sánchez from Aragon along with that of Emiliano García-Page in Castilla-La Stain.
If he achieves this in Aragon, it would practically be that of Page, in fact, the only Gallic village of those openly critical of Sánchez in the entire PSOE, after Ferraz has also achieved the resignation of Luis Tudanca in Castilla y León, who had faced in recent times to the leadership of his party both due to the unique financing agreed in Catalonia and due to the party’s own congressional process. Tudanca, and also without primaries, will be relieved by the mayor of Soria, Carlos Martínez, of the highest confidence of the PSOE leadership.
Five ministers, five missions
The socialists maintain that the reading of the movements that have been carried out has much more to do with competitiveness in the next cycle of regional elections such as the one in 2023 in which the PSOE fell than with a purely organic vision of control of the federations by Pedro Sánchez. “It is about human capital management, pure and simple, in terms of the greatest possible efficiency, which is strengthening the territories with the best assets. And the best assets are in the Government,” Óscar Puente defended this week during an interview on TVE.
The case of María Jesús Montero is, surely, the most politically charged of all the renovations that have been carried out. From the leadership of the socialists they show their gratitude to the figure of Juan Espadas, who once agreed to leave the mayor’s office of the capital of Andalusia to embark on the internal war against Susana Díaz, another of Pedro Sánchez’s close enemies. But something else has been the diagnosis regarding his work in opposition to Juanma Moreno in the Board.
For months now, voices have not stopped increasing among the Andalusian socialists themselves who have demanded a change to renew the political project in a territory that has been a bastion of power for the PSOE for 30 years. And at the federal congress in December, in Seville, those voices became clamor. The doubts about the moment of the replacement and about the person who should embody it have remained until just a few weeks ago, when Pedro Sánchez himself and María Jesús Montero personally addressed the issue.
In the leadership of the PSOE they believe that the passage of the woman with more organic and institutional power after the president represents a political message in itself within and outside the party. Internally, because no one questions the leadership of the deputy secretary general, first vice president and Minister of Finance. And in the face of the elections because it conveys the idea that not even in the case of Andalusia, where the PP holds a very comfortable absolute majority, are the socialists willing to give up the battle at the polls to recover the lost power.
In Madrid it is different. Not even the most optimistic have any private expectation that Óscar López has any chance of overthrowing Isabel Díaz Ayuso of the Community, unless the scenario may arise that the Madrid president ends up making the leap to national politics, something that in the socialist ranks is seen as a real option in the medium term. The meaning of the step taken by Sánchez’s former chief of staff, they explain in the party, has much more to do with the political combat that the President of the Government and Ayuso have been waging for years, and which in recent times has even been bloodier
In the midst of the judicial offensive of the Ayuso government against the family of Pedro Sánchez or against the State Attorney General, the emergence of Óscar López in Madrid politics is seen as a way of interposing a kind of squire between the leader of the PP and Moncloa. to lead a political fight that, in the opinion of Moncloa and Ferraz, Juan Lobato was in no way waging.
The primary process that Pilar Alegría faces also has its particularity. Although the Government spokesperson is considered an electoral asset capable of competing in the elections against Jorge Azcón, the main task with which the Minister of Education and Sports lands in the internal primaries is to evict Javier Lambán and his followers from organic power in Aragón, something very similar to what Juan Espadas was entrusted with Susana Díaz in his day.
The Alegría team shows their optimism about the primaries that will start at the end of January and that will pit her against Darío Villagrasa, the Secretary of Organization of Lambán. And the idea, if it ends up being imposed, is to consolidate the spokesperson for the Executive as the leader of the opposition to Azcón and candidate for the 2027 regional elections from her role in the Council of Ministers, like the rest of her colleagues.
With its sights set on that cycle of elections that must start next year in Andalusia, the PSOE faces the push for government alternatives where they lost power in 2023. As in the Canary Islands. The diagnosis of that debacle just a year and a half ago is that some progressive regional executives who were highly valued for their management fell by the wayside, but who succumbed in the general political context of the full offensive of the right. And that some of them, such as that of the Canary Islands, can be recovered in the short term.
For this reason, the former Canarian president, Ángel Víctor Torres, did not abandon the leadership of the socialists of the islands after reaching the Council of Ministers as head of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory. And the plan involves presenting himself again in 2027 in front of Fernando Clavijo, who presides over a government shared by the Canary Coalition and the Popular Party.
Before, just a year ago, the Minister of Science and Universities was promoted from Ferraz as leader of the Valencian socialists and to block the departure of Ximo Puig after losing the Generalitat Valenciana. An attempt was made to convince Puig to remain in the opposition and run again in 2027, as it was considered a case with similarities to that of the Canary Islands. But his resignation led to turning once again to the Council of Ministers to resolve the succession and forcing Diana Morant’s possible competitors to resign to avoid a confrontation in primaries.
Recently endorsed, the Minister of Science will be, without surprise, the candidate for the Valencian regional elections despite the internal voices that already express their doubts about the suitability of that profile and in a political context completely altered by the management of the DANA carried out by the popular Carlos Mazón.
The theory is that the movements promoted by Pedro Sánchez from the Council of Ministers only seek to politically rearm the PSOE to offer competitive candidacies at the polls as alternatives to the “reactionary governments” of the right supported by the extreme right. In practice, sending his trusted people means closing the circle of his almost absolute control of the entire party.
Source: www.eldiario.es
