“I like her, yes. She’s nice, very close,” says Juan Antonio Rodao, an 80-year-old retired mason, who walks his dog, Jara, while waiting for his wife to leave mass. This is one of the formulas – “I like her”, “I like her” or similar – common among septuagenarians and octogenarians who give EL PAÍS their opinion on María de Guardiola in Puebla de la Calzada (Badajoz, around 6,000 inhabitants), one of the towns that the PP candidate visited this week during her electoral campaign before the elections of December 21, in which she starts as a favorite. On the one hand, there is great sympathy for his character. On the other hand, there is a poorly constructed political motivation to justify its support. “We like it, me and my wife,” Rodao explains without further ado.
In her attempt at re-election, the president has a significant advantage among those over 75, the last of the seven age groups into which the CEI divides respondents. The PP’s 43.8% voting intentions constitute the highest percentage of all parties, all sections combined. No other formation reaches 38% in any group, according to data from the recent Extremadura barometer.
The distance that the PP obtains from the PSOE, almost 13 points, and especially from Vox, close to 40, is much greater than in the whole population, respectively 6.9 and 16.7. Unlike what happens between 65 and 74, where the PSOE resists as the strongest party, after 75 it falls to second place, going from 38.5% before the 2023 regional elections to 30.9% today. Of course, the worst results are those of Vox (4.6%) and especially those of Unidas por Extremadura, the coalition that unites Podemos and IU (0.1%), which confirms the difficulty of new parties and brands in making their way among voters as their hair turns gray and their skin wrinkles, something that the violets suffered even in their most powerful phase and that Ciudadanos then had to verify.
The result is that, among the oldest, Guardiola wins, supported by an increase in the PP in the over 75 group from 26.2% to 43.8%, more pronounced than that obtained in the electorate as a whole, from 24.7% to 30.9%. The gap is so big after 75 years that it makes Guardiola’s party the one with the most voting intentions among all retirees, a traditional area of strength for the PSOE of Extremadura. Those over 75 are also those who give Guardiola a higher rating, 6.79 points, bordering on notable, compared to an average of 5.42 in the rest of the groups. Among those over 75, no other candidate even reaches 4.4.
In a survey, the column of voting intentions of those over 75 is one of those statistical corners capable of drawing a smile or a frightened grimace from a campaign advisor. The behavior of older people in elections generally does not receive as much media attention as that of younger people, especially now that there is a shift to the right among men in younger age groups. But in the face of elections, the oldest are more decisive. According to electoral census data, 125,008 men and women aged 75 or over are registered as of December 21, or 14.5% of the total of 860,359 possible voters. There are 53,273 more than young people aged 18 to 24 whose growing enthusiasm for Vox is attracting so much attention. Among the groups into which the INE divides the electorate, there are only two that have the most registered voters, from 45 to 54 years old and from 55 to 64 years old.
Additionally, older people vote more. Only 1.2% of those who have already celebrated 75 candles say they will not vote on December 21. Certainly, later, there will be more abstentions, in a group where health problems also weigh more heavily, but in any case this is the age group in which there are the fewest declared abstainers.
“It’s not suffocating.”
In Puebla de la Calzada, the party that obtained the most votes is the PSOE in the municipal, regional and general elections. However, when this newspaper tested eight seniors for their opinions on Guardiola, only one criticism emerged. This is an elegantly dressed lady who said she did not find it appropriate for the president’s visit on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, when the city dresses up for the procession of the Immaculate Conception, to be seen in front of journalists, on a day when Guardiola attended mass and then walked alongside the priest behind the pallbearers. “The protagonist must be the virgin,” the woman said before ending the conversation without giving her name. In the others, almost everything was congratulations and only a few indifferent comments, like that of a man who said he didn’t believe much in anyone, neither in Guardiola nor in anyone else.
At 77 years old, Leonardo Pinilla, retired breeder, is the guardian more enthusiastic. He claims that he has already voted for the PSOE in the municipal elections of Puebla de la Calzada, where he believes that there are socialist mayors who have done a good job, but his support for Guardiola is non-negotiable. “She’s sensible, she doesn’t choke. And she’s clear, she does what she says.”
— After the 2023 regional elections, he said he would not govern with Vox and he governed.
— Since he left, Vox has been throwing stones at him — he justifies.
Although he does not have a bad opinion of Vox, according to him, it is Santiago Abascal and his people who are responsible for the conflictual relationship with Guardiola, a hostility that he considers serious when the common enemy of the PP and Vox is “the other”, in reference to Pedro Sánchez.
Returning to Juan Antonio Rodao, who is waiting with his dog for his wife to leave mass, in the conversation with him a factor appears that brings him closer not only to Guardiola, but also to the PP. “The city is dead, there is no one,” he says. That the elections are regional and not local does not seem to matter to him. He wants “that to change,” he says, and Guardiola, president since 2023, represents something new for him.
At 83, Rosario Muñoz says it clearly: “I want Guardiola to continue, I will vote for her.” “They are all the same, they say one thing and then they don’t follow through, but hey, I like this woman a lot,” she adds, including in the catalog where she gives reasons that fuel her sympathy for the PP candidate whose husband, she says, worked in a nearby BBVA office.
—And what you have done for Extremadura, what would you highlight?
—Ah, I don’t think about it…
He doesn’t want to go into details. He loves Guardiola and that’s it.
Well sheltered on a terrace in the Plaza de España, Isabel Cabezudo, 73, and Cati Rubio, 80, drink their coffee. Neither has decided who they will vote for. Rubio even doubts that she will vote, although she knows that it will not be for the PP, because she leans to the left. Of course, his opinion of Guardiola is positive. “I consider them good people,” he said. Cabezudo elaborates a little more: “It is true that we have had very good PSOE mayors here, but we hear good things about him.”
Reasons for a deviation
Juan Francisco Caro, director of the social research institute Opina 360, considers as “striking” the gap in favor of the PP for 75 years in Extremadura, the plausibility of which is reinforced by the fact that – unlike what happens between 65 and 74 year olds – the oldest declare having already voted more for the PP than for the PSOE in 2023. “It seems that, despite measures such as the revaluation of pensions with the socialist party (central) “In government there is a part of the older PSOE electorate that is switching to the PP, which can shock us because the older generations are the faithful, those who change their vote the least”, says Caro, who considers that it is too early to examine the reasons but, in accordance with what the impressions collected in Puebla de la Calzada indicate, he affirms that Guardiola has made a communication effort to show herself as a close leader, which could bear fruit. “During the summer fires, for example, she was seen in the affected areas, listening to people,” says Caro, who believes that the popular candidate took note of the type of leadership of Guillermo Fernández Vara.
Another possible factor, according to Caro, is a possible attenuation of the “fear of the PP”, fuel for decades of socialist hegemony in communities like Extremadura and Andalusia, which would have started to dissipate with José Antonio Monago as president (2011-2015), in a process that would continue with Guardiola.
Paco Camas, director of the public opinion institute Ipsos in Spain, considers this greater inclination for the PP after 75 years to be consistent with a generalized phenomenon: the growing gap in favor of the great historic right-wing party among women in the older electorate, all the more marked the older the voters are because they have a longer life expectancy. This is observable even in the CIS barometer sample over Extremadura. From the age of 75, 60% of those surveyed are women, compared to 40% men.
About The Author
