“The door is closed”. That of abstention is a recurring debate locked in a contradiction. While the PSOE incites the discourse of “fear of Vox” as a lever of electoral mobilization – certainly exhausted – among progressive voters and warns against its advent … to institutions, socialists do nothing to prevent it. They do not put their vote at the service of citizens to avoid the risk of regression that threatens them. The debate is as recurrent as it is overcome. Socialist sources at the highest level reject any possibility of the party facilitating government in Extremadura. “It’s not on the table.”they give up.
However, this issue continues to generate contradictions within the PSOE itself and in its public discourse. There is a current in Extremadura, led by the former President of the Council Juan Carlos Rodriguez Ibarra which openly advocates abstention from the PP to avoid depending on Vox. But in public as in private, there is no doubt: the response to his assertions is negative. “The PSOE asks us to save the furniture of a lady who she got herself into trouble“, respond federal leaders when asked about the possibility of unblocking the inauguration of María Guardiola to avoid an electoral repeat.
“We proposed to vote for the budgets, but they wanted elections,” they respond in denial. In this sense, they attribute “responsibility” for the current blockade situation to the “irresponsibility” of wanting to go to the polls to try to get rid of pressure from the far right. A pressure that has multiplied. In the party they complain that they are always asked for this “sacrifice” and they remember how traumatic the abstention was for Mariano Rajoy in the government of 2016. The PSOE broke in two and Pedro Sánchez emerged from the breach on the back of “no means no” to take the reins from Ferraz.
In this sense, the sources consulted reflect that it is not a simple access to power, to get rid of those of Santiago Abascal, because – they understand – that The PP “not only concludes an agreement with Vox, but also implements Vox’s policies”. “He has the same responses, the same messages and the same inhumane and racist measures,” they emphasize, citing the case of the mass expulsion of Badalona as an example. However, Extremadura has been a reinforcement for these options, with citizen support of 60% last Sunday.
At Moncloa, we try to decontextualize these results of government action. They use, again, a contradictory argument to support their theses. At the Executive, they assure that if the citizens of the autonomy under the aegis of the PP and Vox policies have not yet noticed “the consequences of involution”, it is “because the central government is a guarantee” so that this regression does not occur. In other words, the government sources consulted by this newspaper convey the perception that citizens are capable of discerning between general and regional and will know how to reward the “containment barrier” that Sánchez represents for extremism.
Social shield against Vox
To try to erect this wall of good reasons, the Government took advantage of the last Council of Ministers of the year to approve a strengthening of the social shield. This is the usual trend in December, because with the extension of budgets, the Executive must transmit through decrees the measures that it wants to keep in force and which expire on December 31. The extension of public accounts was also approved.
Although this is an annual dynamic, the government and its partners have used this leverage to try to continue spreading the message that the Spanish “find it profitable” for Sánchez to remain in La Moncloa. This results in a general revaluation of pensions of 2.7% and an increase of between 7 and 11.4% in minimum and non-contributory contributions. The ban on cutting basic supplies, the social electricity bonus and the moratorium on evictions of vulnerable families without alternative housing are also extended.
Likewise, tax incentives are maintained for purchasing electric vehicles, installing charging stations or carrying out energy efficiency work. A whole range of measures that their parliamentary partners can also use to justify to their respective and varied parishes that they They continue to support a government surrounded by scandals and it shows no symptoms of connection with the reality around it.
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