Andalucía Goes to the Polls

Andalucía was always ‘Red’ right up until recent times.

Up to, and after the Civil War, the enormous estates that made up the fertile part of the region was under the thumb of the latifundistas, the absent landlords from Madrid and elsewhere.

During the War, or at least until the fascists regained control, the land was run (no doubt ineptly) by the colectivos. The worker soviets. The cities were impoverished, and many people – those that could – had moved away to Catalonia, Algeria, France, Germany and where possible, Mexico and South America. A figure given suggests 2,700,000 emigrated in search of a better life elsewhere.

The huge majority of the andaluces in those difficult times were lefties – perhaps understandably – and when Franco eventually went to His Reward in 1975, Spain soon threw forth a progressive leader from Seville – Felipe González and the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, the PSOE.

Spain took off, under the new democracy, but Andalucía, always poor and forgotten by Madrid, continued to lag far behind. Its regional government, based in Seville and held by PSOE figures, was noted for its corruption.

Seville: not only the capital of Andalucía’s eight provinces, but also its wealthiest. They say that the money came in – but it never left to be distributed in the satellite provinces (particularly Almería, at almost seven hours by train).

Poor leadership: Manuel Chaves and José Antonio Griñán caught in the ERE scandal; Susana Díaz, inept and then the one after her… (you know, I’m not even going to bother to look him up).

Now, in 2026, those people are all gone – some with prison sentences, others deserving of them. Even Felipe González, Seville’s most famous son, is now under a cloud.

The Junta de Andalucía, the regional authority, is currently in the hands of a conservative. He’s Juanma Moreno, perhaps the third or fourth in importance in the whole of the PP. Elections are to be held on May 17th and he’ll no doubt get in again.

How did the voters come to switch their allegiances?

For one thing, they discovered a social class below them: the immigrants.

Second, as above, they saw the corruption and graft in the socialist camp.

Thirdly, simply voting conservative gives one, at least and if nothing else, the sensation of having joined the middle classes.

And life goes on. Only, it doesn’t if you get ill.

Juanma Moreno, like Isabel Díaz Ayuso in Madrid, has been supporting the private health sector at the expense of the public one. Ayuso is stained with the unnecessary deaths of the 7,291 elderly folk in the residencias during the Covid, Juanma has the problem of the lost breast cancer results which affected several thousand women. They have both been seen to be dismantling their regional public health systems.

The PSOE-A only has the one shot at the moment in its electioneering (despite having a senior ex-Government minister as their candidate), and that’s the state of the Servicio Andaluz de Sanidad. The public health service is clearly underfunded and being drained by the private sector – and there are many who don’t have the funds for private insurance.

The elections in Andalucía will probably run as expected, but supposing Moreno has to come to a deal with Vox. Will their ‘national priority’ put me back at the far end of the waiting list, in a public hospital that is sorely underfinanced?

 

Political Posturing

There was a meeting of the world’s main socialist leaders (well, the western ones anyway) in Barcelona late last week, with the presidents or prime ministers of Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay, South Africa and so on: President Sánchez the host. As the Madrid leader Isabel Díaz Ayuso said cattily, a world meeting of narco-states. Having offended half of the planet, Ayuso then gave Venezuela’s María Corina Machado a golden gong during that worthy’s brief visit to Spain on Saturday to meet Feijóo and Abascal (Edmundo González, the old boy who either won or didn’t win the Venezuelan election last year and is now living in exile in Madrid -at the invitation of Sánchez- couldn’t make the event down to an age-related illness).

Whether Ayuso’s medal plus a Golden Key to the City donated to the Venezuelan leader by the Mayor of Madrid will both end up in Donald Trump’s massive trophy cabinet along with Corina’s Nobel Peace Prize and so many others, remains to be seen.

Another story this past week was the regularization of up to half a million foreigners already living in Spain but without the proper paperwork. Mostly Latin Americans, but, yes, some Muslims and Africans too. Feijóo says he will go through them with a magnifying glass when he becomes president.

Since he can only reach that noble station with the support of Vox, one can believe that he means it.

Indeed, the share-out of the first of the regional elections – Extremadura back in December – has now been resolved following acquiescence over 74 points from Santiago Abascal’s party. Vox takes the vice presidency and two departments: social services and agriculture.

The reason to call the elections last autumn in the first place was to get rid of the Voxxers, but precisely the opposite occurred, and it’s no surprise to see that their benign support didn’t come cheap. Vox continues to deny gender violence and uses broad strokes in its denialist speeches against renewable energies or the green agenda. And then there’s the migrant issue (or ‘institutional racism’ to give it its correct title), where migrants (that includes us guiris as well), will be placed at the back of the queue for the doctor and any other public services guaranteed in the Constitution under the execrable concept of ‘National Priority’…

María Guardiola, the president of Extremadura, in 2023: “I cannot allow those who deny gender violence or who are dehumanizing immigrants to enter the government.”

That is precisely what she has just signed, after four months of increasingly frantic negotiations with Vox. As Groucho Marx said: ‘I have my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others’.

Foreigners in Extremadura are just 4.7% - far from the national average of 14%, indeed the total population of the region is shrinking, but the Voxxers are on a roll.

Short of obtaining Spanish nationality, migrants of course don’t have the vote. 

So it’s no burkas in the streets (they are as rare as hen’s teeth in Extremadura, but one has a point to make). As for denying health attention to the foreigners – will that somehow stop them from sneezing on you? As the journalist Ignacio Escolar says, discriminating against the foreigners won’t make them disappear, it only makes their life harder.

Two (rather larger) regions were facing the same dilemma – whether to bow to the far-right (as Aragón finally did late Wednesday afternoon) and Castilla y León, again with a PP majority but needing Vox, and then there’s the Region of Andalucía which will be voting on May 17th (we read that the PP is apparently a little short of a full majority there, according to the pollsters).

If – let’s call it ‘the Extremadura Experiment’ – shows the PP prepared to submit to Vox on certain points which won’t cost them votes, then this will be the larger plan for when Spain goes to the polls next year. After all, there are no more frontiers against the far-right: ‘I am a democrat who respects election results’, says Feijóo.  

They might be illegal, or bordering on the illegal, but a new PP/Vox government can (and will) change the laws it considers to be in error, granting ‘a national priority’ in social services to those with a DNI card.

Progressive voters must find what inspiration they can from Pedro Sánchez’ words last week at the Global Progressive Mobilization Summit of world leaders in Barcelona opposed to the policies of Donald Trump and his diminishing group of admirers: "The far right and its lackeys make a lot of noise, a lot of tweets. But these extremists aren’t shouting because they're winning, they're shouting because they know their time is running out." 

We shall see.