We live in the country where pedestals are erected and graves are dug the fastest.. It is one of the consequences of this policy of trenches that we have in Spain, which exacerbates everything, exaggerates it, hatred and affection, so that when the electoral expectations that had been created are frustrated, everything is more dramatic. Dizzying ups and downs, honeyed praises and poisoned stabs. Especially in Madrid, which is the center of all political debate, where conspiracies boil daily and evil runs like rats through the corridors of restaurants.. Precisely for this reason, it is always convenient to get away from these polarization currents, so powerful, and contemplate reality with some distance. and with more temperance. For example: Pedro Sánchez has achieved his objective in these general elections because he was the one who best knew how to interpret the results of the municipal and regional elections last May. We are going to look at the statement he made the day after the elections, in Moncloa, to announce that he was also bringing forward the general elections. What he maintained in that speech, and in those he made later before his own, deputies, senators and executive, is that the institutional weight that the PSOE had lost did not correspond to the electoral support it had obtained.

“Magnificent regional presidents, socialist mayors and mayors are going to be displaced with impeccable management. And this despite the fact that many have seen their support increase yesterday,” said Sánchez.

To most of us it might have seemed presumptuous: how could he speak that way, after the crash, with the number of town halls, councils and autonomous communities that the PSOE had lost? What the socialist leader noticed was that the map in which everything appeared dyed blue hid that the PSOE maintained a floor of more than six million votes (6,291,812), which was not so far from that achieved by the Popular Party, of seven million (7,054,887).. With a distance of 700,000 votes, one could not speak, indeed, of an electoral tsunami, in any case, an institutional tsunami. It may seem trivial to us, but these are very different social and political realities.

By calling immediate general elections, without giving time for the Popular Party to establish itself in the town halls and provincial councils, as well as in the autonomous communities, it could recover the 400,000 votes lost in May and aspire, with seven million Socialist votes, to a new parliamentary majority in the Congress of Deputies, even if it did not win the elections.. He has achieved it, more than enough, as has been seen, because everything has worked for him: the short-term electoral calculation, the mobilization of his abstentionist electorate and the useful vote that has come from the other lefts..

The problem of the Popular Party, and of all the predictions that have adorned it with flowers in these two months, has been just the opposite, having confused the institutional tsunami with an electoral tsunami. But none of this turns the result of these elections into a debacle for the PP. Absolutely. When it is stated that the Popular Party has collapsed on 23-J, or that it has fallen, the first thing that is ignored is that it has achieved a million more votes than two months ago. Anti-Sanchism, which already existed, not only has not deflated, but has increased in these elections to over 11 million votes, if we add those obtained by Vox. Let us think that with that same electoral figure, 11 million ballots, the Popular Party obtained a large absolute majority in 2011, the 186 seats of the first Government of Mariano Rajoy.

With the fragmented right, the electoral tsunami in general elections is impossible, although in municipal and regional elections they make an institutional tsunami possible with the pacts. Let's look at the mere sum: with the same votes with which Rajoy got those 186 deputies, the sum of PP and Vox now stands at 169 seats. There are 17 deputies who are lost due to the dispersion of the vote; the same dispersion that would have guaranteed the Popular Party an overwhelming absolute majority, like 12 years ago. In other words, the same number of votes that were raised against Zapaterismo in 2011 is the one that has gone to vote against Sanchismo in 2023, but leaving thousands of votes useless in many provinces in which the PP has not obtained one more seat due to the vote that has gone to Vox, which has not obtained anything in that constituency either..

In any case, whatever the data, what nothing and nobody is going to prevent is that this is the most bitter victory of the Popular Party in a general election. And since we are in the country of pedestals and tombs, as was said at the beginning, the leadership of Núñez Feijóo at the head of the PP has already begun to be questioned. It would be, by far, the worst mistake that the Popular Party could make and the only thing the PSOE general secretary needs to round off his sweet defeat, is for them to move Feijóo's chair. Let them think about it coldly, because there was not a tsunami before, nor is this now a debacle. Expectations after the municipal elections were exaggerated and it was not taken into account that, although the return of bipartisanship is unquestionable, it has not yet been completed, neither on the left nor on the right. Question Feijóo in these circumstances? The worst mistake of the PP, yes, no matter how Bambi they see it, as an esteemed colleague says.