The electoral evening in Extremadura leaves a feeling of clear victory for the PP after having been crowned the leading force, far behind the PSOE, which scores more than 17 points. María Guardiola appeared almost at midnight … to celebrate the results: “We clearly won the elections. “We asked for more confidence and they gave it to us,” said the president, hoping that this Monday she will begin a series of contacts with the rest of the parties to seek support. However, he also sent a message to Vox after confirming that he had not spoken with Santiago Abascal: “We want to move forward without going backwards. It would be very good for him to have a calm reading of the polls,” he assured.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo, for his part, followed the examination in the company of the national leadership and in the presence of the president of Aragon, Jorge Azcón, who is the next leader to be examined in the month of February. He did indeed call Guardiola by videoconference to congratulate her on her electoral victory: more than 43% of the vote. Of course, the absolute majority they fought for was very far away. He only managed to win one seat, at 29.
In Genoa, they insist on valuing the results and emphasize that “the defeat of the PSOE is great”, describing as a “beating” what the Extremadura polls gave to Pedro Sánchez, whom they consider the big loser of a night that anticipates, without a doubt, the end of an electoral cycle. “We are already working for the next big night of the PP,” they say in the hard core of Feijóo, watching the Aragonese elections. “After beating them today, we are already working to beat them again on February 8. On that day, Sánchez should not be president of the government,” they say.
Genoa calls PSOE result a “beating” and insists on asking Sánchez for generals
The vision conveyed by the Popular Party is that it has achieved the objectives set: it has increased the votes by 4 percentage points compared to 2023, it has more deputies (in fact only one), it adds more than the entire left combined and, above all, it has caused a historic collapse of the socialists. The other objective for which they are campaigning in Genoa has not been achieved: to substantially reduce their dependence on Vox. Quite the opposite happened: Santiago Abascal gave the surprise of the evening, obtaining practically 17% of the votes, a percentage that even Vox did not expect in this autonomous community.
It is true, as the PP points out, that Guardiola obtained practically the same percentage of votes as Juanma Moreno in Andalusia, more than 43%. But Extremadura, a community made up of two constituencies, made it very difficult to optimize the vote in seats. In recent days, popular leaders have considered it possible that the president could approach the percentage of 46% already achieved by José Antonio Monago in 2011.
The other problem that keeps coming up in Genoa is the historic rise of the right in a community like Extremadura, where the left has dominated for almost four decades. PP and Vox together produce 60% of right-wing voters. A new sociological reality that anticipates where the new electoral cycle will go. Popular leaders insisted Sunday that it was “the result of sanchismo.”
“This is what Sánchez is provoking,” they summarized, convinced that the Extremadura laboratory anticipates what will happen in Aragon, in Castile and León, in Andalusia and throughout Spain as soon as the generals are summoned. “The PSOE loses more than twelve points. “The biggest setback in the history of democracy for a party that had also just won the elections,” they insist on the hard core of Feijóo, recalling that only two and a half years ago the Socialists were the leading force, even if they were tied in seats with the PP.
In any case, the President of the Council decided to bring forward these elections to obtain support and depend less on Vox. A frustrated objective because Abascal’s party now has more strength than before.
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