Moreno wants to give the final blow to the PSOE in Seville and is a handful of votes away from achieving it

A little over a decade ago there were three: Seville, Jaén and Barcelona. Jaén turned blue in 2011, when the socialist power collapsed before the absolute majority of Mariano Rajoy. And Barcelona fell into the hands of En Comú Podem in the best moments of Pablo Iglesias. Seville remains an impregnable French village, but the legions of the Andalusian PP believe that this time, they will be able to beat the best-oiled socialist machine in the country. And for this they have the magic potion of Juanma Moreno, the only political leader without the PSOE card who has managed to win in this territory, although it was in the regional elections on June 19. And the truth is that both parties believe that the battle will be settled by a handful of votes..

Seville is the Andalusian province that distributes the most deputies, a dozen of the 61 that leave Andalusia on their way to Congress. The current distribution is unreal, they admit both in the PSOE and in the PP. And that is due to the weakness with which the popular arrived at the November 2019 elections. This made it easier for the PSOE to achieve 5 of the 12 seats, by 2 from the PP, 2 from Unidas Podemos, 2 from Vox and 1 from Ciudadanos.. And it was Juanma Moreno himself who said in an act in Mairena del Aljarafe that his party was “in a position” to win in Seville in a general election for the first time. Socialists admit that this possibility exists.

A few days ago, the numbers of the Socialists predicted a tie between 4 deputies in the province, with the fifth in dispute between the two big parties. This responds to the absorption of Cs voters by the PP and the capture of a seat for Vox or the left. Also to the possibility of snatching that fifth seat, which will be settled in a handful of votes. To achieve this challenge, Alberto Núñez Feijóo has the inertia of that absolute majority of Juanma Moreno. A little over a year ago, the popular ones surpassed the socialists in 143,000 votes in the “PSOE cathedral”, as the current leader of the party of the fist and the rose, Javier Fernández de los Ríos, defined the province..

The Sevillian leader is the new name on the rise in the Andalusian PSOE. And this is so because, despite that defeat, the Socialists managed to prevail over the PP in the municipal elections on May 28, although they lost an absolute majority in the Provincial Council for the first time. The provincial entity, chaired for a couple of weeks by Fernández de los Ríos, is the main bastion of institutional power of the party led by Juan Espadas at the regional level, together with the Jaén Provincial Council, which is still in the hands of Francisco Reyes.

This match is the first outside of Andalusia, let's go out and convince.

We are going to win Seville in a general for the first time in history.

For Andalusia and for Spain!

🗣 @JuanMa_Moreno#EsElMomento#VotaPP pic.twitter.com/BEZDiQXaTu

– PP of Andalusia (@ppandaluz) July 18, 2023

It is no coincidence that the rally to close the PSOE campaign in Andalusia will be held in La Rinconada, the city of almost 40,000 inhabitants in which Javier Fernández de los Ríos has been mayor since 2007. There will be the provincial leader together with Espadas and the number one on the Seville list, María Jesús Montero.

Shoemaker and Rajoy in Seville

“If the PSOE wins, the reading is that in Seville we do not have a structural problem, that the problem was in the autonomous regions,” says a party source in the province, who, however, admits the need for the Socialists to review their current strategy and discourse to reconnect with the public.. The Sevillians will have the support of the star of the PSOE campaign, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who closes in Seville after passing through Cádiz. The presence of the former president in Andalusia acquires even more relevance if one takes into account that Pedro Sánchez has not passed through Andalusia in the last 15 days after opening the pre-campaign in his stronghold of Dos Hermanas.

To achieve its objective, the PP placed Juan Bravo, Finance Minister in the first legislature of Juanma Moreno and economic manager of the Genoa management, as number 1 for Seville.. Inspector of the Treasury and father of the tax reduction of the popular government, he has demonstrated in the campaign his ability to intersperse political messages with the technical knowledge of a senior official. His path to 23-J has not been without controversy and the phrase about the difficulty in finding “ham cutters” despite the high unemployment figure has earned him some criticism.

What happens in Seville will be a clue to what happens in the rest of Andalusia. The socialists consider that it is very difficult to come back in the bastions of the popular east, with Malaga and Almería as the best examples. The loot of deputies distributed by the most populous community in Spain causes all the spotlights to be on the south in these days of the campaign. Juanma Moreno, at that rally in Mairena del Aljarafe, slipped that 5 of the 15 seats in dispute are played in the region that he presides over.

The objective of the PP is to go from the 15 deputies that they achieved in 2019 to close to 30. If they succeed, they will be the main pillar of the hypothetical victory of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who will be in the capital of the Costa del Sol on the last day of the campaign before traveling to A Coruña. Exactly the same thing happens in the PSOE. Victory seems difficult, but the floor of the socialists in Andalusia is at 20 seats. Now they have 25. The resistance of the largest federation in the party would be key for Pedro Sánchez to achieve the numbers that would allow him to continue in Moncloa.