The PSOE competes with Vox for the deputy of Guadalajara on which Page's re-election could depend
In the map of tight results drawn by the polls for the elections next Sunday, Castilla-La Mancha occupies a prominent place, where the continuity of Emiliano García-Page at the head of the autonomous government could depend on a single deputy. What except surprises will settle the scrutiny is if the PSOE wins more seats alone than the sum of those of PP and Vox, which is expected to replace Ciudadanos in the hemicycle.
Internal tracking carried out by the Socialists in recent days predicts that the candidacy of the current regional president will obtain 18 or 19 seats, in both cases above the absolute majority of 17 that all polls do not predict.. What they have perfectly identified, moreover, is that the representative who dances for them is going to dispute it with Santiago Abascal's party in Guadalajara.
For this reason, in addition to participating in a rally in the capital of the province, during the first week of the electoral campaign, García-Page has visited the municipalities of Molina de Aragón, Torrejón del Rey, El Casar, Pastrana, Sigüenza and Azuqueca de henares. This last stop is particularly significant since the Executive of Pedro Sánchez plans to build a refugee reception center there, which has contributed to mobilizing support for the political option located more to the right there.
“The profile of Vox voters in Guadalajara is similar to that of Castilla y León: it has a certain boom in urban areas, but where it is most deeply rooted is in rural areas,” says Mariano Urraco, sociologist and member of the College of Political Sciences. and Sociology of Castilla-La Mancha. In this way, he explains that, although the capital concentrates half of the inhabitants of the province, the election of the so-called fifth deputy will be “closed” due to the strength of the Abascal formation in the towns of the La Alcarria region.
The province with the least population in this community, only behind Cuenca, chooses the political color of five of the 33 seats that make up the autonomous Parliament. Traditionally, two are taken by the PSOE and another two are for the PP, although in 2019 one of them was taken from Ciudadanos. The fifth is the one that has fallen to the right on some occasions and on others to the left.
In this electoral appointment, the socialists will dispute it with Vox, according to internal polls by Page's team, which predict that the radical right-wing party will obtain between one and three deputies. The representation could come to them through the candidacies of Toledo, Ciudad Real, Albacete and Guadalajara, but it is only in the latter that it would be at the expense of the party in charge of the Government.
In 2014, the PP asserted its absolute majority in the Parliament of Castilla-La Mancha, a region with more than two million inhabitants, to reduce the number of seats from 49 to 33. The equating of the size of the chamber with that of La Rioja -the least populated community in the country, with barely 320,000 residents- makes pluralism difficult to the point that it left Podemos without representation four years ago, despite obtaining 6.9% of the ballots, and, by extension, without options for the addition of the PSOE to his left.
In the less fragmented regional Parliament, Vox now aspires to make its debut, which has set its electoral sights on the 28-M in this community. Coinciding with the central weekend of the campaign, Abascal was precisely last Saturday in Guadalajara and on Sunday in Ciudad Real and Albacete, in addition to having chosen Toledo for the closing rally this Friday.
tense campaign
Both the prolegomena and the electoral campaign itself are being particularly tense in Castilla-La Mancha. At the end of April, the PP presented a criminal complaint for libel and slander against four charges from the PSOE for their “lies” in the matter of the collection of mileage allowances for their candidate for the Presidency of the Board, Francisco Núñez, who, at his Once, he has been forced to return the around 16,000 euros that he had received in “locomotion” expenses since the beginning of the legislature despite traveling in an official car.
PP van in Puertollano (Ciudad Real). . m.
For its part, Page's team has censored the “vans of shame” with the logo of the popular ones that are touring the region with messages such as “vote you Txapote” along with the image of the regional president, Sánchez and the general coordinator by EH Bildu, Arnaldo Otegi. In another, the regional leader is seen with his fist raised over the word “expropriate” and the message “heading towards Bolivarian socialism” as a criticism of the law approved alone with the absolute majority of the Socialists that allows the expropriation of “underused” land.