Dos Hermanas will be on yellow alert this Friday and this Saturday due to high temperatures, according to Aemet. The notices have not yet reached Sunday, June 18, but the PSOE has decided to change the location of Pedro Sánchez's pre-campaign kick-off meeting due to the high temperatures when there is still a month and a half left for the July 23 elections. The socialist leader had chosen the Lago de la Vida de Dos Hermanas, an open-air auditorium where he announced his intention to return to being secretary general of the PSOE after the coup of the Federal Committee on October 1, 2016.. The symbolism will be decaffeinated, since the meeting will be in the municipal booth of the Sevillian city.

The change of location, advancing through The Objective, responds, according to sources from the federal PSOE and the Andalusian socialists, to this forecast of heat, which expects maximums of 34 degrees for the time of the rally. The municipal booth, although it is covered, is no less hot, but it does prevent the militants who attend the act from being in full sun. “That is the lesser evil”, they explain from Ferraz. In the socialist leadership they contemplate an attendance of some 3,000 people, which is the same capacity as expected in the initial auditorium, but it must be taken into account that this rally arrives with the militancy exhausted after a very demanding municipal campaign and that has not generated the results expected.

The heat argument is not trivial, if one takes into account that maximum temperatures above 35 degrees are common at the end of July, when the general elections are going to be held. It is no coincidence that in Andalusia, where Sánchez kicks off the pre-campaign with the act on Sunday, elections cannot be held in July and August. In 1994, the autonomous Parliament changed the electoral law with the endorsement of all the parties to prevent the regional elections from coinciding with the hottest months.. The thesis of the Andalusian Executive of Manuel Chaves was that the holidays and high temperatures could affect participation and distort the electoral result.

Sánchez ignored this situation when he decided to advance the elections and the measures that the Ministry of the Interior will take to guarantee the well-being of the members of the polling stations on 23-J are still unknown.. But the heat is one more factor to take into account in the mobilization of the electorate and the socialist militancy. Especially if one takes into account that the affiliates of the PSOE threw in the rest in the municipal campaign of last May 28. “We are never going to be more mobilized than in local ones,” admits an Andalusian socialist leader. and the explanation is simple. On 28-M, many of the militants risked their future, the continuity of a proximity government.

Now they have to campaign for generals to guarantee the continuity of Sánchez without forgetting that there has been a debate in recent months about the effect of the presence of the PSOE general secretary at their rallies. The president himself admitted that the defeat of 28-M took away “good” mayors and regional presidents. Juan Espadas himself spoke of a “wave of anti-Sanchism” to justify the bad data from the municipal authorities, the same argument used by the still mayor of Seville, Antonio Muñoz.

We must not forget that the Andalusian PSOE, the party's largest federation with more than 45,000 members, is still licking the wounds of a loss of institutional power that has not been seen since 2011. The defeat in the Huelva Provincial Council and the overturn in the capitals, with Jaén still in uncertainty, the party is still in a state of shock. Sánchez's choice of Dos Hermanas has a reading beyond personal symbolism. Francisco Rodríguez, heir to the historic Quico Toscano, revalidated the absolute majority of the PSOE in this Sevillian town on 28-M in the midst of the socialist defeat caused by the wear of the brand of the fist and the rose and the good moment it is going through the PP of Juanma Moreno.