Socialist Andalusia, that repository of PSOE votes that under Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra was an impregnable bastion and with Chaves and Griñán a major autonomous community guaranteed for the Spanish left, election after election, now exists only in the history books. On Sunday all eight Andalusian provinces fell on the side of the People's Party (PP), including Seville, which has been lost by the PSOE in regional elections for the first time since the first ones held, in 1982. The PP, with more than 42% of the votes and an absolute majority in the Parliament of 58 seats, three more than necessary, obtains an historic result and its candidate, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, who campaigned draped in the Andalusian flag and not the PP's sky-blue and seagull, has won from the centre, absorbing the growth that the polls attributed to Vox. Ciudadanos (Cs) disappears: the party of hate, which came into being to fracture Catalan society and turn the language debate into a judicial issue and not an educational one, loses all 21 of the seats it held in the Andalusian regional chamber.
Hurricane Bonilla in Andalusia would have caused a power outage at the PSOE's Madrid headquarters on Calle Ferraz as well as at the Moncloa government palace. There's a reason for that too: the Socialist strategy in Andalusia bears the personal stamp of Pedro Sánchez, and goes back to his confrontation with former Andalusian PSOE boss Susana Díaz and the choice of the former mayor of Seville, Juan Espadas, as candidate. It is not that the Socialists have lost Andalusia, something that as far as the government is concerned had already happened in 2018, it is the fact that, while on that occasion they still finished ahead of the PP by seven percent on election night, this time they were a whopping 18 points behind. The Socialist rescue campaign put in place in recent days, aimed at saving private Sánchez in the face of the conservative gale that was beginning to howl, will not protect him from the enormous difficulties that will be coming his way from here on in, with a more than evident economic crisis and without a parliamentary majority guaranteed, unless ERC decide to freely give away their votes again in the Congress of Deputies.
The Andalusian elections have the opposite effect for the PP to that of the PSOE in Spain: Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who arrived a few months ago at the Calle Génova headquarters to replace Pablo Casado, decimated after his confrontation with Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has an unexpected horizon of relatively easy access to the Moncloa. This Sunday's elections also show something else: Vox can be contained electorally since, although it is true that it rose from 12 to 14 seats, it is not the indispensable partner that it wanted to be and has fallen far short of the 20 seats attributed to it by the surveys. What happened in Madrid also happened here: when the right has real options to govern, there is a steady stream of voters who decant from the extreme right towards the PP and this damages the far-right formation.
The defeat of the PSOE is by extension that of the entire left since the results of Por Andalucía - five seats - and Adelante Andalucía - two parliamentarians - are very poor, falling far short of the 17 obtained by Podemos and the pro-Andalucia left in 2018 with a single list. And it is that, in addition, the sum of the three parties on the left is 36% while that of the PP and Vox together is close to 57%. All these data make it impossible for Pedro Sánchez to escape the crisis that is going to open up in the Spanish government, the electoral spine-chill that the Socialist barons are going to feel as they prepare for next year's municipal and autonomous community elections, and the inevitable cabinet reshuffle before summer vacations begin.
Because the economic crisis and its management will, for a while, penalize most of those who govern. It happened with Sánchez in Andalusia and with Macron in France, where the latter's party lost its absolute majority and reaching a political understanding within the legislature will not be easy. With a left led by Mélenchon, who has the second largest group in the legislative chamber and the extreme right of Marine Le Pen not only with its own parliamentary group but also as third largest party. From now on, governing is going to be a high-risk pursuit.