Madrid (EFE).- The elections on July 23 will bring back the ‘melee’ model of televised debates after accepting the PP leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the offer that the Prime Minister launched 24 hours before Pedro Sanchez. However, there will not be six electoral duels, one a week until the elections are held, as proposed by the socialist candidate, but, for now, only one.
The popular candidate criticized the proposal of the PSOE general secretary and called it an imposition, since “debates are not forced”, but rather “negotiated”, and immediately advanced that “there will be a face to face” between Sánchez and the”.
He added in an interview on Onda Cero that it will have to be the campaign managers who decide the format, date and place, in which electoral legislation must be taken into account, article 66 of the Organic Law of the General Electoral Regime (LOREG) specifically.
Moncloa does not rule out that there is more than one. Government sources consider that a single televised duel is not enough, so they will maintain pressure on the PP so that there are more, and they even reserve the possibility that the president avoid attending that ‘face to face’ accepted by Feijóo if the popular they do not agree to the celebration of others.
“Melee”: format of bipartisanship
Pedro Sánchez’s proposal, a weekly debate with Feijóo from next Monday until the elections, fits into a format, ‘face to face’, characteristic of bipartisanship.
Until last Monday, when the president made the proposal, Atresmedia and RTVE had been interested in its organization and broadcasting, which offered it to the two candidates for July 12 and 10, respectively.
Telecinco reported after that last week it also transferred its proposal for a debate between Sánchez and Feijoo to both formations, although without specifying a date.
The last precedent: eight years ago
This type of electoral strategy has not been used since December 14, 2015. The last ‘face to face’ to date was carried out by the then president and leader of the popular, Mariano Rajoy, and the candidate of the socialists Pedro Sánchez, and it will be one of the most remembered for this set between the two:
Sánchez accused Rajoy: “The Prime Minister has to be a decent person, and you are not.”
And the PP candidate responded: “That’s as far as we’ve come. First, if you believed that you should have resigned and you were not worthy of being President of the Government, your obligation was to present a motion of censure; That’s what I would have done.”
But the appearance of other political forces has caused this dialectical debate to open up in the last electoral contests to four candidates on average, and even five, like the one on November 4, 2019, after Sánchez will call legislative elections after failing to form Government.
This five-person debate (Sánchez, Pablo Casado, Albert Rivera, Pablo Iglesias and Santiago Abascal) was carried out by the Academy of Television and Audiovisual Sciences and Arts, and was moderated by journalists Ana Blanco (TVE) and Vicente Vallés. (Antena 3) and was broadcast on twelve channels.
A few months earlier, prior to the elections on April 28 of the same year, in the middle of the campaign, an anomaly occurred: two debates in 24 hours. They were led by four candidates, since Vox did not have parliamentary representation and did not meet the requirements established by the Central Electoral Board to participate. Those candidates were Pedro Sánchez, Pablo Casado, Albert Rivera and Pablo Iglesias.
History of debates for two
Television debates have little experience in Spain. The first time that two candidates for La Moncloa faced each other was on the occasion of the 1993 elections, two and a half years after the birth of private television. Felipe González and José María Aznar held two debates, one on Antena 3 TV and the other on Telecinco.
The second time that two candidates for the presidency of the Government defended their programs in this way was on the occasion of the general elections of March 2008. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Rajoy debated on two occasions.
For the general elections of November 20, 2011, the candidates Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba and Rajoy held a single debate for two and it was also produced by the Television Academy and moderated by the president of the Academy, Manuel Campo Vidal, who already did so. in 1993 and 2008.
In the general elections of December 20, 2015, three debates called by the media were held, in some of which the representatives of the two new emerging formations Ciudadanos and Podemos participated for the first time.
The one that confronted the two candidates of the majority forces, the one on December 14, was also moderated by Campo Vidal.
The referee: the Central Electoral Board
The absence of regulations that regulate electoral debates on television in Spain has left the difference made by the polls in the decision to request or decline the participation of the leaders in the “face to face”.
The formation that starts as the winner does not grant them, and only when the polls give a technical tie do the candidates take the risk to try to stimulate and raise the level of participation and win the undecided vote.
In Spain, the Central Electoral Board (JEC), which is the one that authorizes them, maintains that plurality, proportionality and neutrality must be in the general information of the media, both public and private ownership, and not in certain programs.