Enrique Rodriguez de la Rubia
Madrid (EFE).- Abstention harms the left, Castilla y León is right-wing… Politics and its most notorious manifestation, elections, are a breeding ground for clichés. Some are true, others are half true, and a good number of them turn out to be directly false, even though they are repeated like a mantra at each appointment with the polls.
Abstention harms the left
One of those clichés that is not fulfilled, or that is fulfilled only sometimes, is that high abstention demobilizes the left and favors the formation of right-wing majorities.
It is true that the great victories of the PSOE, such as that of Felipe González in 1982, or that of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in 2004, occurred in elections with a high turnout.
In 1982, the turnout at the polls was 79.97 percent of voters, the highest reached in a democracy, while in 2004, in those elections marked by the 11M attacks, it was 75.66 percent.
However, the elections with the second highest participation in history, with 77.38 percent, was the first victory of José María Aznar, in 1996.
In more recent times, Mariano Rajoy won the 2011 elections with 68.94 percent and repeated his victory in 2015 with 69.67, while in 2016 he fell 66.48 percent.
The first elections with Pedro Sánchez at the helm, in April 2019, participation rose again to 71.76, but in the electoral repetition, in which the socialist candidate won again, it fell to 66.23 percent, the lowest in the historical series.
Dismantling the topic somewhat, it is in moments of political change when participation soars, regardless of whether it is to the left or to the right.
The red belt is passed to the blue
Another of those recurring topics is that of the existence of impregnable electoral strongholds, those barns of votes that, in reality, have gradually been diluted as bipartisanship eroded.
One of these strongholds was the “Madrid red belt” which also had its mirror in Barcelona in the municipalities of the metropolitan area of Barcelona.
In the last regional elections, the PP of Isabel Díaz Ayuso won in all the municipalities of the Community of Madrid except in two, El Atazar, in the north, and Fuentidueña de Tajo, in the south, in which the PSOE won. None is in the red belt where the PP was systematically the party with the most votes.
Ayuso was also the most voted in the 21 districts of the city of Madrid, including working-class neighborhoods, theoretical strongholds of the PSOE such as Villaverde or Puente de Vallecas.
However, the absolute dominance of blue on the electoral map is just a mirage, because if all the left-wing parties in these areas are added up, they are still ahead of the right.
For example, in Puente de Vallecas, the sum of Más Madrid, PSOE and Podemos-IU reached 61 percent of the votes, compared to 36.66 for the PP, Vox and Cs.
However, in Catalonia, the cliché of Barcelona’s “red belt” is still valid to a large extent.
The predominance of the PSC in the metropolitan area results in the control of weighty municipalities such as L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Cornellà, Sant Boi, Gavà, Viladecans or Sant Adrià del Besòs, while the communes maintain El Prat and Barcelona itself, with Ada Colau.
In the same way, inland Catalonia continues to be a bastion of the independence movement, ERC and JxCat share the majority of mayoralties, with specific exceptions such as the “Galic village” of Pontons, a municipality in the l’Alt Penedès region historically governed by the pp.
The Left Bank becomes right
The socialist “fief” of the Left Bank of the Nervión estuary, in Vizcaya, has been reduced only to Portugalete, where it has always held the mayoralty, although it lost the elections in 2011, while the rest of the “worker” municipalities, another fallen myth since the closure of heavy industry in the 80s and 90s, are now the preserve of the PNV.
The nationalists have governed Barakaldo since 2015, Sestao since 2011, Santurce since 2007, Abanto since 2003 and Trapagaran since 2015, in most cases with a wide difference, even tripling the votes of the socialists.
In reality, the only real stronghold the PSE has left in Vizcaya is Ermua, where it has won by far every election since 1979.
This fall in weight of the Left Bank is noticeable even in the internal power in the PSE-EE, where these groups have ceased to be the most important “family” of the party in Euskadi, displaced by Guipúzcoa, Bilbao and Vitoria.
In “Fachadolid” the PSOE wins
If there is a somewhat derogatory nickname that has accompanied the city of Valladolid, it has been “Fachadolid”. A play on words aimed at labeling the city of Pisuerga as a “right-wing” city.
A stereotype that the polls have been in charge of denying, since Valladolid has been governed by socialist mayors for 27 years of democracy.
And it is that the PP, which has Castilla y León as one of its historical bastions, is choking on the capitals of this community.
Of nine capitals of Castilla y León, only one mayor’s office, that of Salamanca, belongs to the PP. The PSOE holds those of Valladolid, Soria, Segovia and Burgos; IU occupies Zamora; Ciudadanos, thanks to an agreement with the PP, governs in Palencia, and a local party, Por Ávila, governs in the capital of Avila.
Some “disassembled” topics that will be seen if they are maintained or definitively ended with the elections on May 28.