Among left-wing voters, the fear that the barbarians are now at the gates has been front and centre. The victory for the Right in May’s local and regional elections was a wakeup call for many people and Sánchez sought to harness this shock by calling an early general election. Also, such fear is no longer abstract as we can see concrete examples of what a PP-Vox government would mean through the various coalition pacts they have signed in city halls and regional administrations over the last month and the type of reactionary policies they are pursuing in these places.  

But while this fear is going to mobilise a lot of progressive voters, for us, it is not enough. You also have to be able to convey a certain level of hope, with a clear project that people will want to fight for. Some on the Left have criticised Yolanda [Díaz, Second Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Labour and Social Economy] for focusing heavily on our programme, claiming that in a campaign defined by very basic emotions, you cannot talk about something as serious as a programme. But simply sounding the anti-fascist alarm is not enough to mobilise all of our electorate. Furthermore, it is also going to primarily benefit PSOE. If the dominant issue is fear of the far-right, well, PSOE is going to gain a large tactical vote. 

Instead, we have focused on engaging our voters around questions that matter to them in their daily lives. What has most resonated among our proposals are probably those related to the world of work and labour. In her role as labour minister, Yolanda has advanced new social agreements on workers’ rights, seeing the guarantee of decent, stable employment as the main axis around which to articulate a broader agenda of new rights, social commitments and a more solid welfare state. And so the measures I’ve talked most about with voters are our proposals to reduce the working week to 32 hours, as well as our plans to further increase the minimum wage [which has already increased 47 percent since 2018] and around protecting pensions. Ultimately, Sumar is the only guarantee that this country will continue to advance in workers’ rights and social justice. 

Part of the issue has been the government’s failure to effectively counter the Right’s relentless media campaign against it. This has had an impact, particularly on the PP’s ability to win over many of the swing voters that move between it and PSOE. We are only talking about a small group of 800,000 to one million that are at play but without clear ideological or party alignment, they are easily swayed by changing political currents. And for the last three years, we have had this narrative portraying us as a democratically illegitimate government that is in an alliance with Basque terrorists. When you have this day after day, it has an effect on such voters. 

Beyond that, a part of our electorate was clearly demobilised during May’s local and regional elections. The Right’s electorate in Spain is always much more disciplined in coming out to vote, particularly in local polls, whereas, in contrast, the Left suffers from much greater fluctuations in its turnout. In May, part of our base seemed caught in a melancholic state, looking backwards towards an earlier political moment around the 15M movement wave when everything seemed possible. In one sense, this is understandable given that we currently face a much more complicated scenario, marked by the war in Ukraine, the cost of living crisis and by a conservative wave sweeping across Europe.  

But our electorate is now clearly responding to our campaign and becoming more mobilised. Particularly in the last week, we have seen polls tightening as predicted participation levels have increased. Furthermore, unlike in May when we had rival left-wing lists running against each other, with Sumar there is now a united left candidacy. Working with [the regional left-wing party] Compromís here in Alicante has made our campaign much more effective, not least because they have such a strong ground organisation.  

It has also helped that we are seeing certain figures in Podemos coming out to actively support Sumar, such as [party co-founder] Juan Carlos Monedero. I would have liked to have seen more support from some of the other Podemos’ leaders but in the end, the party has now more fully entered the campaign on our behalf. 

One thing I have been repeating during the campaign is that this has been a very good government of resistance in the face of a series of historical crises or, to put it another way, a strong tactical government. Prime Minister Sánchez is a brilliant tactician and moves very well over the short distance. That is why he is a political survivor. 

We took office in January 2020, two months before the pandemic hit, and this has meant much of our energies have gone into crisis management and trying to protect people and their living standards from these shocks. At the same time, many of the more ambitious reforms, which imply more profound legislative changes, have been driven by us rather than PSOE. I am thinking of Yolanda’s reform of Spanish labour law or the new LGBT and feminist rights that have been secured. 

In contrast, with PSOE, we have had a partner which has accepted some of our proposals in terms of responding to the cost of living crisis, and before that with the pandemic, but, at the same time, it has been a constant brake when it has come to instituting longer-term reforms. For example, in response to runaway profits in the last year, we pushed it into accepting an emergency wealth tax as well as windfall taxes on the banks and energy companies. But all this has been labelled as provisional, whereas we are also demanding a more permanent tax reform so these companies always pay what they should.  

PSOE now seems to believe it can fight this election by promising that things can continue as they have been. There is also a certain triumphalism in its discourse as it plays up Spain’s headline economic figures. But many people have lost purchasing power over the last eighteen months, despite the good inflation figures, and now want change. This does not have to mean, however, electing a government which will seek to return us to forty years ago. We have shown we can govern and what we are saying now is, ‘Make us stronger and we will redouble the pace of change’. A more favourable correlation of forces at cabinet will allow us to manage major economic ministries or a ministry of state and, from there, launch more ambitious reforms.  

If we get over forty seats, we can begin to demand more. Here in Alicante, for example, we lost out on a second seat to Vox in 2019 but I would put us as close favourites to flip that last seat the way things stand right now. There are various tight races involving Sumar, which could tip the balance away from the Right and towards the Left. 

Of course, there are also a lot of unknowns—above all, what effect holding a general election for the first time in July will have. It is a bank holiday weekend in many parts of Spain and so this could affect turnout, but it is very hard to know among which collectives. 

The major electoral opening for the far-right in Europe has generally been through its weaponising of the immigration issue. But in Spain, despite Vox’s use of anti-immigrant talking points, the far-right’s breakthrough came in the context of the Catalan independence conflict and its momentum has been sustained, in turn, through its targeting of feminist advances. Fascism always needs an enemy to purge and as the tensions in Catalonia have reduced over the last few years, Vox has positioned feminism as the primary threat—seeking to harness the resistance to recent advances among certain sectors of the population. 

Another important campaign message in this sense is that we have to react in the face of such reaction. The Left has to show our pride in what we have achieved and to say not one step backwards. We are going to keep moving forward, right? Because in the face of the discourse that PSOE has often put forward about the need for gradualism and not to alienate men of a certain age, etc., the reaction from the Left should be precisely the opposite. It should be to strengthen and redouble our efforts and to continue moving forward precisely because popular disaffection comes when people feel that you have not fulfilled the commitments you have made. They have to see that the government is for them, that it defends their interests. 

You fight reaction by guaranteeing rights—by being able to guarantee decent public pensions, the right to housing and public health, that is, by securing the material basis for a stable and secure life for all. 

The first thing is that they will be able to implement the type of retrograde policies that they have been announcing in the regional governments where they are governing—from forms of censorship to stripping women, immigrants and LGBT people of their hard-won rights. Nearly worse, however, is that such a coalition government would further whitewash and normalise fascism as a legitimate political alternative. We have people who are openly questioning people’s rights and threatening to revoke them and this generates no reaction among the PP ranks. They have no issues with governing with these people. 

Instead, you have this cynical argument that our cooperation with [the Basque] EH Bildu and other pro-independence parties in parliament is somehow equivalent or worse than their enabling of the far-right.

If you had told me a year ago that we were going to reach an agreement with the entire Spanish alternative left in ten days, I would have said you were mad. And yet we have achieved it, with an agreement that brings together fifteen formations. That is an important milestone, a very important milestone. But from the 24th onwards, the challenge is precisely to establish the organisational means to allow for a certain unity of action in our very plural political space. We need to ensure an internal methodology that can allow a collaborative and cooperative spirit to prevail. This will be a lot easier if we get a good result on Sunday but clearly it is going to be one of our priorities in the coming months.