Andrew Ede22/06/2020 18:09
TW
0

Polls of voting intentions can seem irrelevant when elections are a long way off, although in Spain - based on recent experience - you can’t be entirely certain that an election isn’t just around the corner. For now though, Pedro Sánchez’s PSOE and Pablo Iglesias’s Unidas Podemos are maintaining their minority coalition with the aid of a pick-and-mix approach to harnessing support from nationalists and anti-nationalists (Ciudadanos).

Sánchez and PSOE haven’t done too badly in the polls and are emerging from the state of alarm with support, compared with last November’s election, pretty much intact or greater than it was. It depends on who’s doing the surveys. If it is the Centre for Sociological Research, a sort of government quango, PSOE seem to poll particularly well. Which is why the CIS has been accused of somehow manipulating the surveys.

So when a survey appears in a media source not known for its enthusiasm for either the CIS or PSOE and still shows Sánchez to be in reasonable shape, then there can’t really be any quibbling. This particular poll also points to a revival in Partido Popular support, to Podemos standing still and to Vox in decline (and fairly significantly so). The latter doesn’t surprise me. I don’t know that Vox have done themselves any favours with some of their behaviour during the crisis. They, like Podemos, aren’t what the public are looking for right now. There is some safety with PSOE and the PP. Crisis, of this type anyway, is not a time for radicalism.