The PP and the low-hanging fruit syndrome

During the last 10 days, we have repeated that unfocused polls and a climate of opinion apparently adverse to Pedro Sánchez generated an excess of confidence in the PP during the electoral campaign. That caused his mistakes and his insufficient result. It's true. But actually, the problem goes back a long way..

In 1996, Felipe González had governed for 14 years and his government had been subjected to an unsustainable succession of shocks: the great crisis after the Olympics and the Expo, the GAL scandal, countless cases of corruption. José María Aznar had ideologically renewed the PP and made an implacable opposition, but his victory in the elections of March of that year came as if it were a predestined event. It was simply impossible for the PSOE to continue winning and governing. Something similar happened in 2011. A crisis broke out for José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero that ended a long period of unusual enrichment, announced the biggest cuts in public spending in democracy and was left without credible answers to the collapse of social trust. He believed that the agony of the PSOE government had already begun. Just a year ago, I assumed that this would be due to the sum of inflation and recession, a lethal combination for any government. That was the hypothesis preferred by the PP and Alberto Núñez Feijóo went so far as to say that “we are heading towards a deep economic crisis”. But that crisis did not fully occur, and the PP decided last April that the economy was not going to be its main electoral argument.. However, since he had already decided that the PSOE cycle was ending, he changed the reasons for that end. This would end, he thought, because of the approval of bad laws (the only yes is yes, the reform of the Penal Code) and the leading role in the government of undesirable partners. Many of us think that this would cause a significant loss of votes for the PSOE. But for the PP, a prisoner of that mentality, this served as an excuse to continue, after the regional elections in May, an incoherent policy of alliances. It helped him to give in to the temptation of using the terrible reference to Txapote. It helped him to think that his program could be limited to being a repeal of sanchismo. It did not matter. Victory, he thought, would fall like ripe fruit again..

A muscular program

The ripe fruit syndrome, that mentality according to which you have to wait for the PSOE to fall by itself, was already worrying in the past. Now, with the presence of Vox, it is even more damaging: Abascal's party and its radical theories not only take votes from the PP, but also give them to the left. Consequently, the PP has no choice but to equip itself with a muscular ideological program that allows it to define itself and appear, rather than as an inevitable but unappetizing plan B, as the embodiment of a certain vision of Spain.. “Muscular”, however, does not necessarily mean “more to the right”, as critics of the PP leadership often assume when it loses an election. It means, above all, “free from the low-hanging fruit syndrome”.

This is easier said than done, but if new elections are held before the end of the year, the PP should try not to repeat the role imposed on it by that mentality according to which it does not come to power on its own merits. However, even more important is that, if the PSOE manages to form a government after the summer, the PP gets rid of that mentality completely and forever.. Those responsible will be able to tell themselves that the new legislature will be even more complicated for Sánchez than the previous one due to his need for new and intractable allies.. They will be able to tell themselves that the recession, which did not come before this election, will come after, and that the cuts in public spending will certainly come too.. They will be able to tell themselves that the legislature will be short and that, next time, surely, the victory will be for the PP.

But we have already seen that this mentality is not effective and that the low-hanging fruit syndrome is paralyzing for the national PP, because it inhibits it from making a robust and coherent ideological plan, and bad for Spanish democracy.. Even those who don't vote for him, even those who aren't center-right, need him to stop thinking that his job is just to be there when we get tired of the PSOE.. And in putting his hands so that the power falls into them.