The left-wing press has not done its job

During the last years, as one spoke with the intermediate positions of the Moncloa or with the informal advisers of Pedro Sánchez, one began to understand what the Presidency plan was. It was probably not a defined strategy. Maybe they were just a bunch of loose ideas. But they constituted a medium-term vision, until the elections arrived..

In the first place, these people thought, socialist voters didn't mind pardons for pro-independence leaders.. And they would end up showing indifference to the reform of the Penal Code that benefited them. The left would see both, together with the negotiation table with ERC, as a smart way to deactivate the independence movement. Of course, the coalition with Podemos did not bother almost any leftist voters. And they took for granted that the mistakes during the pandemic, the support for Morocco on the Western Sahara issue or the enormous difficulties in processing European funds were only temporary irritations, or perhaps not even that.. For these interlocutors, the socialist voter saw the legislature as a window of opportunity: the progressive laws that could be approved in it would justify everything else.

But, faced with their conviction, we asked these advisers and analysts if they were sure that socialist voters were going to ignore all this.. They grudgingly acknowledged that dissent or criticism could arise among less enthusiastic voters, especially over alliances and some feminist issues.. But all that, they told you, would be resolved when the electoral campaign arrived.. The possibility that Vox would enter the Government and the threat that the PP was radicalizing would work their magic and the upset voter, maybe even the centrist voter, would stay in the PSOE..

But some of us doubted. And we told those interlocutors and they were friendly with us: “Our surveys tell us so”, they affirmed. “You'll see”. But if the results of Sunday's elections are those indicated by the polls, it will be shown that these two central ideas of Sánchez's political project were weak or, directly, wrong.. Why didn't they listen to us? Well, in the first place, because those intermediate positions and advisers, without any decision-making capacity, but with a certain influence, believed that those second-rate columnists were wrong.. But also for another reason: because those of us who told them, or who wrote it, were not the people they were willing to listen to..

friendly criticism

There is a general psychological rule that goes beyond politics: we pay more attention to criticism from people we know like us well than to those we perceive as adversaries.. And the friends of the government never felt like telling left-wing power in public that it was making those mistakes.. The tone of some liberal or right-wing media has been very harsh with Sánchez (in my opinion, in some cases, several red lines have been crossed). But the media closest to him —El País, ElDiario or La Vanguardia— thought that their job consisted of protecting the Government from these attacks, not warning him that some of his decisions could make his re-election unfeasible.. They were not blind or dumb. ElDiario vigorously criticized Marlaska's decisions in the tragic death of immigrants on the Melilla border. But they hardly seemed willing to make a solid and loyal critique of everything else.. Much less daring were Cadena SER or the progressive infotainment network, with Greater Wyoming at the helm..

The government would have listened to them. I don't know if I would have listened to them, but I would have thought that their criticisms were not malicious, but attempts to help him run his program and survive successfully.. These media could have said with much more emphasis that the Government, despite its faith in its two strategic ideas, could lose many voters with a reform of the Penal Code that is very difficult to justify.. Or allowing Podemos to keep a Secretary of State like Ángela Pam Rodríguez in office and assume the most confrontational versions of feminism.. In too many cases, these outlets thought their role was to oppose the opposition. They believed that the legitimate programmatic affinity with the Government required an ineffective form of loyalty, not an indication of the many risks that it assumed.. Others denounced them, but no government takes seriously the criticism that comes from the media it considers adversaries. He only considers abandoning his most ingrained assumptions, or his most counterproductive tactics, if his friends ask him to..

the same for the right

Of course, if a right-wing government is formed after the summer, we will run the risk of suffering, as has happened so many times in Spain, the symmetrical phenomenon: a liberal or conservative press convinced that its role consists of opposing the opposition and protect Feijóo, his decisions and his probable, and dangerous, coalition with Vox. That would not guarantee the failure of that new government, but it would make it more likely..

Unless you're a psychopath, criticizing your friends is hard. But it is most useful for them to understand when they should correct their course or shake off a belief that has proven to be wrong. The left-wing press should have done that job with Pedro Sánchez to a much greater extent than it has. Only she would have listened. The rest of us, inevitably, were ignored by the government. Or something worse: he considered that the critics of the adversaries were the definitive sign that he was doing things well. I'll probably find out on Sunday that that wasn't true either.