Madrid (EFE).- This midnight will conclude an aggressive electoral campaign that began muddied by the inclusion of exetarras in the EH Bildu lists and has ended mired by complaints of vote buying, two major issues that have monopolized the agenda and displaced the public policy debate.
Only the pre-campaign and campaign announcements by the Prime Minister and PSOE Secretary General, Pedro Sánchez, approved immediately after Tuesday by the Council of Ministers, have managed to gain a foothold in the media.
If Sánchez has insisted on his “proactive” campaign, the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has repeated over and over again, meeting after meeting, his objective and mantra: “Sanchismo must be repealed.”
Sanchez’s announcements
Housing was the first area on which Sánchez, even before the campaign began, announced a battery of measures. It was on April 16, at a PSOE event in Valencia, when he announced that the Government wanted to go beyond the Housing Law, for which 50,000 Sareb homes would be mobilized.
There were more announcements about housing, but also about health (primary care and mental health) and about parity. There were also promises in the territories that he was visiting, such as Seville, with the completion of the subway works.
The defense of the welfare state and the government’s social policies have been the basis of President Sánchez’s speech, determined to confront his country model with that of the right and the neoliberal response to the financial crisis.
EH Bildu’s lists
This campaign, with a marked national accent, has undoubtedly had a leading theme: the EH Bildu lists.
On May 10, while Sánchez traveled to Washington to meet with US President Joe Biden, the front page of a newspaper in which the presence on the EH Bildu lists of 44 candidates who They were sentenced for belonging to and collaborating with ETA, including seven for murders.
“These are your partners Mr. Sánchez for May 28, this is the electoral poster with which your party is presented,” exclaimed the popular spokesperson, Cuca Gamarra, after which a torrent of reactions followed one another.
Sánchez, two days later, and after meeting with Biden, considered that it was not “decent” that there were those convicted of ETA terrorism on the Bildu lists, although it may be legal.
The resignation of the seven candidates for murder by ETA to be councilors if they were elected did not abate the storm of reproaches, which reached its most tense moment in the face-to-face between Sánchez and Feijóo in the Senate on May 16.
The controversy not only pitted the two and other parties against each other, but also highlighted the differences between the popular leader and the Madrid president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, regarding the banning of EH Bildu.
A position, that of Ayuso, closer to that expressed by Vox, whose leader, Santiago Abascal, has also called for the outlawing of this party since the first day of the campaign, while repeatedly criticizing the PP for “standing profile”.
Vox’s criticism of the PP has been repeated on the opposite side, in this case from Podemos, where the Ione Belara-Irene Montero tandem have thrown their darts at the PSOE, accusing them of being an “eminently conservative” force.
Vinicius and the purchase of votes
Although the debate surrounding racism over the insults to the Brazilian Real Madrid footballer Vinicius Jr. captured the campaign’s attention for a few hours, the alleged vote-buying plots in different parts of Spain eclipsed any other issue until the end of the bell.
It started in Melilla, but as the hours have passed, more cases of possible electoral fraud have become known, from Mojácar (Almería) to Albudeite (Murcia), with several socialist candidates being investigated.
To this has been added a string of complaints from the PSOE, the majority directed against PP charges in different locations.
A campaign, therefore, in which the protagonists have not been the candidates of the twelve autonomous communities, plus Ceuta and Melilla, and of the 8,131 mayoralties in dispute, but the political leaders who will face each other again in the long pre-campaign which begins as soon as the polls open.
