Juanma Moreno Bonilla, the leader of the PP in Andalusia, will be able to govern the autonomous community with a comfortable absolute majority (58 seats out of a total of 109) after winning 42% of the vote, more than one and a half million ballots, against a PSOE that won less than one million, 25% of the vote, and 30 seats, three fewer than in the previous legislature.
Vox, the far-right party that aspired to be decisive and force its way into the Andalusian government, has been left with 13% of the vote and 14 seats and is irrelevant. The same for Por Andalucía, the new project of Yolanda Díaz and the people of Unidas Podemos, Izquierda Unida etc, has been left with five seats (losing 12) and Adelante Andalucía, a split from Unidas Podemos, has been left with two deputies.
The three parties of the left have 35% of the vote and 38 seats when four years ago they obtained 44% and 50 seats. This explains why the spokesperson of the national PSOE, Adriana Lastra, has been quick to rule out that the result of Andalusia, as before those of Castilla y León and Madrid (all with PP victory) can be extrapolated to the rest of Spain. Or that it has anything to do with the national reality “where the PSOE continues to lead the polls,” she says.
The true fact is that with a turnout of 58%, only two points higher than in 2018, the PP improves by 32 seats and 22 points on the 2018 election result and manages to stay in the Palacio de San Telmo thanks to 800,000 new votes. Half a million are probably the votes that corresponded to the centrist Ciudadanos, the party with which it governed until now in coalition and which has disappeared in Andalusia. But another 300,000 are the votes of new voters and, predictably, many are votes that on previous occasions had gone to the PSOE.
We can imagine that many regular voters of the Andalusian PSOE have thought, like the socialist president of Castilla-La Mancha, García Page, that the PSOE has finally achieved, with Pedro Sánchez, “the perfect unanimity, that of one”. So it does not need more support – it already has that of the Catalan independentists, amnestied by him, that of the Basque independentists, that of the communists and the extreme left? – to bring forward this coalition and progress government which, as has once again been demonstrated, has the public spellbound.
