Although the speakers, Felipe González and Juan Manuel Moreno, and the topic of the talk: A political duchesshad been announced almost a week in advance, the call for the Andalusian elections this Monday had enveloped this Thursday’s appointment with a morbidity much greater than the curiosity that had already been aroused by this atypical meeting around an issue, the relationship between Cayetana Fitz-James Stuart – whose centenary of his birth is being commemorated (especially in Seville) – with the political sphere, also peculiar. It is not the first time that both leaders, from different generations and apparently distant political positions, coincide in public events – in fact in recent years they have done so on at least three occasions – but, in the middle of the electoral campaign, the photo of the popular leader with the former president of the socialist Government, who for the PP has emerged as the guardian of the essence of the PSOE against the sanchismhas become his best asset to spur that “borrowed vote” from the disaffected socialists that gave him an absolute majority in 2022 that is now elusive, according to the polls.
In this context, and taking into account that a few months ago González acknowledged that in the general elections he would not vote for Pedro Sánchez, another unknown to be resolved was whether the former socialist leader was going to reveal his preferences for May 17. But the former leader of the PSOE has not given rise to speculation. “I am a socialist,” he responded to journalists when they asked him if he felt more comfortable with Moreno or with his party’s candidate, María Jesús Montero.
Aside from that issue, one of the key questions of the next elections is what that voter who is probably very upset by the health management of the Andalusian president is going to do. “Moreno is directing the campaign towards that socialist sympathizer,” points out Ana Salazar, political scientist and CEO of Idus3. “With his talk with Felipe he is once again appealing to, let’s put it in quotes, that true socialist, sending the message that the true socialist votes for Moreno Bonilla,” he adds. The search for that identification is not genuine. It doesn’t even go back to the last elections. In 2018, the pre-campaign began in the pine forests of Puebla del Río, in an enclave of Seville where in 1973 González, Alfonso Guerra and Manuel Chaves, among others, became famous photo of the tortillain a wink to attract voters disenchanted with almost 37 years of PSOE governments in the community.
Moreno, with the permission of the former president, who inevitably ends up monopolizing the attention and the prominence of the conversation in this type of events, has tried to exploit that moderate and focused profile in his interventions. He has defended the need for “predictable governments with roadmaps” in a situation of uncertainty in the United States and the European Union. “You have to govern with broad vision and enormous flexibility to adapt to circumstances,” he added. And with that vitola of institutionality he has thrown a cape at González to thank him for the fact that the first line of the AVE was destined for Seville. “I appreciate that there are State policies that go further, that are thought in the long term and that is why I like the AVE, because it allowed the south to have the ability to compete with the rest,” said the popular leader.
Previously, the former president of the Government had mentioned how the Expo or the Olympic Games put Spain on the world map, in 1992. “The AVE began to work, not like it does now,” said González, raising a wave of applause. The railway situation in Spain has been the only point in which the former socialist leader has allowed himself to be openly critical of the management of the national government. “What is happening seems absurd to me and when it is said that this is the best” era of the railway in Spain,” he stressed to question the situation of the Rodalíes and that its management is going to be transferred to Catalonia. “If they transfer it to them, they will also be incapable of fixing that mess.” The former socialist leader, who has acknowledged that if he were 50 years younger he would run a campaign with the slogan “what I want to do is make Spain work,” has also been given time to address the war in Iran and question the capacity of Donald Trump. ”There are two clear winners at the level of this geopolitics of chaos: China and Russia. The United States is losing,” to warn that no conflict will be resolved until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is resolved.
If a barometer had been made based on those attending the conference – closer to the age of González than Moreno – it could be said that the president of the Board has fulfilled his mission. “We have come here for Felipe, for Juanma and for the Duchess, but if they came to talk about another topic, we would have also come,” Rosario, 62, commented at the beginning, who always voted for the former and who this year will vote for the latter. “They are sensible politicians,” said Marisa next to him, “of a similar age.” José Antonio has come to listen to Felipe and his seatmate, who does not want to give his name, for Juanma. “They are both moderates. Before, I would have wanted something more hardcore, but the way things are, we prefer them,” he says.
Unrest among Andalusian socialists
This meeting, although organized since June of last year by Cayetano Martínez de Irujo – son of the Duchess of Alba, promoter of the Cajasol Foundation’s lecture series about his mother, inaugurated this Thursday, and who chose the speakers personally, as confirmed by sources from the organization – has caused discomfort in the current PSOE of Andalusia. No socialist leader has attended the talk, in which the mayor of Seville and the ministers of Finance and Culture have been present. Moreno knows this and this Wednesday he questioned whether his party “ostentatiously rejects its past,” after highlighting his “admiration and respect” for the former president and highlighting his “magnetism, leadership and ability.”
Because the forum was about politics, yes, but not in an electoral key, but in an aristocratic key. González, who maintained a “not intense, but frequent relationship” with the Duchess of Alba, as he has acknowledged and has told anecdotes about their talks at the Duelas palace or during a horseback ride through Doñana where she asked him to invite her during her summer vacation at the preserve. “He liked real politics, the kind that affected people, when there were international conflicts,” he said. The former president has vindicated the free spirit of Cayetana de Alba, “She was a free woman with an unrestricted sense of freedom, but she was responsible and respectful, she was compassionate, capable of suffering with those who suffered.”
The Duchess of Alba never hid, nor does Moreno now, her admiration for González. “He is a very important man and a very good friend of mine,” he told Efe in an interview he gave on the occasion of the publication of his memoirs. There he also acknowledged that on some occasion he had voted for the PSOE. Contrary to what it may seem, it was this party that granted the aristocrat, one of the largest landowners in Andalusia, the greatest distinctions in the community. In 2005, the Seville City Council, governed by the socialist Alfonso Sánchez Monteseirín, awarded her the city’s Gold Medal, and a year later, the Board, with Chaves at its head, named her favorite daughter, in the face of the protest of 500 day laborers from the Rural Workers’ Union, who suffered police charges and some arrests.
In his eagerness to reclaim his focused and Andalusian profile, Moreno has also wanted to frame the Duchess’s legacy within that framework of moderate Andalusianism that he has known how to occupy and that has left the left confused. “She was a unique woman, who acted as a Sevillian and Andalusian and she did it with enormous naturalness,” to emphasize: “I think she would probably be horrified by some of the things that are being experienced today: populism, radicalism, intolerance, up-to-the-minute politics, she would not identify with that.
