At eight in the afternoon of this July 18, in Córdoba the thermometers mark 40 degrees. In the shade, because in full sun the mercury shoots up even more. Few are the daring who dare to challenge the umpteenth heat wave that, if we compare it with an earthquake, has its epicenter in the Cordoba capital, although the aftershocks are felt throughout the Guadalquivir Valley. But you don't need to look out into the ghost streets of Córdoba to start sweating, just take a look at the alert maps of the Spanish Meteorological Agency (Aemet) for hot flashes to appear.

Córdoba has not stopped being red or orange (and it has no political connotation, only meteorological) since the electoral campaign began and asking ordinary citizens to vote has become here, as in other parts of Andalusia, a whole challenge. Nothing to do with the campaign of the last municipal elections, and that already in May in Córdoba the sun is pressing. Not to mention that a good part of the population literally flees to the coast of Malaga.

The 40 degrees of Córdoba at eight in the afternoon are transformed into a much more bearable 30 degrees in Fuengirola, the tourist enclave of the Costa del Sol where the accent that is most heard is that of the Caliphate capital. For this reason, the PP of Córdoba has thought of moving at least part of its campaign there where its voters have fled the heat and this Tuesday it has organized a rally with its candidates and main referents in the Plaza Pedro Cuevas de los Boliches.

The idea, explains the president of the Cordovan PP, Adolfo Molina, is that candidates who present themselves in this province move to where their potential voters are and all this in coordination, he emphasizes, with the Popular Party of Malaga, because the campaign is organized in each province the local structure of the party and it is not a question of getting into someone else's campaign. Molina himself participates in the Cordovan/Malaga rally, together with the mayor of Córdoba, José María Bellido, the president of the PP of Málaga, Patricia Navarro and the candidate Ana Mulas.

The heat has forced us to refine electoral strategies and, beyond persecuting the voter to their summer resorts, certain unwritten rules have been imposed but full of common sense. The first, which is shared by all the parties, is that the large electoral acts -already increasingly depleted in number and influx- are not held later than 11 or 12 in the morning (depending on the province and according to the forecast of the day) and not before 9:00 p.m. if it is in the afternoon.

Candidates of the PP of Córdoba distribute propaganda in a market first thing in the morning. PP CORDOBA

In fact, the opening of the Cordovan PP campaign had to wait until nightfall on Thursday the 8th and a place as cool as possible was sought. That has been the norm of the entire campaign, in which, in addition, Molina says, less common tactics have been chosen or to reinforce tools that on other occasions have been marginal. In the Cordovan PP they have put their candidates on the phone to make hundreds of calls, especially to militants who are intended to be mobilized and who, in addition, mobilize their entourage to ward off one of the greatest fears of these elections, that the participation falls on the date chosen for voting and its coincidence with the holidays.

One of the central acts of the PP campaign in Córdoba, the commemoration of the death at the hands of ETA terrorists of councilor Miguel Ángel Blanco, took place in Puente Genil last Thursday and, like the acts of a certain magnitude This campaign was held in a closed and properly air-conditioned area, sheltered from the unbearable heat that is capable of melting the greatest of electoral enthusiasms.

Although in Córdoba the rigors of the heat are felt especially fiercely, the adaptations of the campaign to the thermometer have been the general rule in the Andalusian Popular Party, with very limited rallies and in very specific time slots. Even in the marketing of the campaign, the difference has been noticed and the members of Nuevas Generaciones have spread out on beaches such as those in Cádiz to distribute balls and towels with the party logo and, incidentally, propaganda leaflets asking for the vote for Alberto Núñez Feijóo .

Representatives and interveners

The heat is also making it difficult for the PP to find proxies and auditors for election day. The president of the Junta and the Andalusian PP, Juanma Moreno, warned at the beginning of the campaign and official party sources have confirmed it, although the problem is not insurmountable and they do not believe that they will be absent on July 23. In the PSOE and in Sumar they assure that they do not have this problem.

In the Andalusian PSOE they have followed a very similar pattern. The coordinator of the campaign, Antonio Gutiérrez Limones, sums it up in a few words: “take advantage of the hours” of less heat and “be everywhere”, in all the media, whatever their field, so that the message – basically that the PP and Vox are the same and that a government of the right would be a setback and a reduction of rights- it reaches all voters without them having to leave their refrigerated living room.

Before noon and after nine at night are the periods of the day in which all the events organized outdoors have been set, which have been completed with the deployment of candidates by the media and with a strong commitment to social networks. Without abandoning any corner, Gutiérrez Limones highlights that special attention has been paid to the coastal areas of the community, to which a good part of Andalusians move at this time, as has been done by Sumar, the platform led by Yolanda Díaz and that he has had to modify his campaign, equally, due to the temperatures.

Sumar campaign launch ceremony in Córdoba, held next to the banks of the Guadalquivir and at sunset. EFE

It is no coincidence that the great act of the candidate to be the first president of the Government of Spain was held last weekend at the Cartuja Center in Seville, where more than 2,000 people gathered in the heat of Díaz and the cool of the air-conditioning.

Many of the sectoral meetings, with social or neighborhood groups, have been organized electronically, which has saved the Sumar team travel, has allowed them to occupy the hottest hours and, in many cases, bridge the distance with the representatives of these entities, many of them displaced to their summer resorts.

In Córdoba, to continue with the capital of the Andalusian heat, Sumar also began the campaign with the sun already gone from the horizon, around ten o'clock at night and on the banks of the Guadalquivir river. In Malaga, where the temperatures are much more bearable, that same act took place an hour and a half earlier, a sign that this campaign is not only going for neighborhoods, but above all for thermometers.