The general secretary of the PSOE of Seville, Javier Fernández, has already stated in an interview with this newspaper: “The Andalusian PSOE cannot rethink its direction every day.” Despite this, the buzz around the figure of Juan Espadas does not diminish, who, as leader of the Andalusian socialists, is now facing the most crucial months of his mandate. The advancement by Pedro Sánchez of the Federal Congress to next November, which will be held precisely in Seville, implies by calendar that in the first weeks of 2025 primaries must be held to decide the general secretary just before the celebration of the next regional congress. Espadas has already stated that he wants to participate in this fight, while his former rival, Susana Díaz, maintains the discourse that she is not there for these fights.
That the Federal Congress is in Seville is not a coincidence, because Andalusia is one of the territories that most worries Pedro Sánchez at the moment and the PSOE has closed a cycle in which it lost all the electoral nominations. And this is not a joke in the territory of the most important socialist federation in Spain, with more than 42,000 members. In 2026 there will be Andalusian elections, which is why Espadas himself demanded this Saturday that his people – in the framework of the interparliamentary, where the Andalusian deputies, senators and parliamentarians are – greater involvement, that they stop with half measures (“either we are there, or we are not”) and that they are determined to win the next Andalusian elections, “everything must be subordinated to it”.
Espadas has therefore ordered “to orient the direction of the entire organization to win the next elections in Andalusia”, it is assumed that with him on the command bridge, because the message he reiterates is that he aspires to repeat as leader of the party and as a candidate. But in the end, everything is in the hands of Pedro Sánchez, who is the one who pushed him to leave the Seville City Hall in 2021 to contest – and win – the position of secretary general to Susana Díaz. There is a debate within the federal leadership, but the absence of a clear replacement (here everyone looks at María Jesús Montero, who for the moment does not want to know anything about the story) and the fact that there is no structured critical current in Andalusia play a role in favor of the current Andalusian leader.
It also remains to be seen whether the earthquake in the PSOE’s organic calendar affects Espadas’ intention to hold a political conference next September to analyze the party’s strategy in Andalusia, a commitment with which he responded to critical voices after the defeat in the European elections. The proposal was put on the table at the meeting held in July by the PSOE-A’s steering committee, the highest decision-making body between congresses, where for the first time deeper reproaches about the party’s leadership were heard.
Teresa Ribera, Susana Díaz, primaries…
All these speculations could be denied in the unlikely event that Sánchez recruits Espadas for his government, taking advantage of the remodeling that must be undertaken with the departure of Teresa Ribera to Brussels. There are people in the party who are thinking about this option, which at first glance seems far from being a real option and which, in any case, will take a few more weeks to materialize, but which, if it were to come true, would force him to leave both the spokesperson in the Senate and the direction of the game in Andalusia.
In any case, in the first weeks of 2025 there will be primaries, a fight that Susana Díaz is not involved in, who was brutal this Saturday when she went to the interparliamentary. “I have passed that stage,” he stressed, also defending that his position in this regard is more than known. Of course, in recent days he has raised his voice against the fiscal pact for Catalonia signed between the PSOE and the ERC, highlighting the critical current maintained by his party colleagues, insisting that “this goes against what the socialists defend.”
Although he formally insists that he does not aspire to lead the party again, the current regional executive is convinced that he has never lost sight of this aspiration, and it is in this context that the fight took place at the end of July when Espadas accused Díaz of having accused her of not having defended former presidents Manuel Chaves and José Antonio Griñán in the case of the ERE. This shows that the waters are not entirely calm within the Andalusian PSOE, although so far no one has taken the decision to defend a critical current.
This is the panorama of this beginning of the political journey, which the socialist general secretary launched with a letter to the Andalusian president, Juan Manuel Moreno (PP), requesting a meeting to address the Andalusian position regarding the reform of the regional financing system. which, according to her, must follow the steps already marked by the 2018 agreement in Parliament. In any case, he asks him “as president to clarify the proposal that he is going to bring to the Council of Fiscal and Financial Policy”, aware of the tensions that this generates within the PP itself. “He is not capable of defending the proposal of the 2018 agreement before Feijóo because it does not coincide with that of Rueda in Galicia or Ayuso in Madrid”, he declared on Saturday to the Andalusian interparliamentary.
And in this forum, he asked his people to wake up, that “our history cannot be written into the rules of the game that Moreno sets,” the mantra of the mistreatment of our land is repeated relentlessly while the largest volume of resources and state funding that can be remembered. “We must react,” he stressed, because the Andalusian PP has now turned to Catalan funding while “Andalusia must aspire to the same levels of self-government as Catalonia, that is our Statute.”
Call to order
In this sense, he called on his people to do “more pedagogy” to explain the situation in Moreno’s Andalusia and to “talk less about what the right wants us to talk about”. “Let’s not let ourselves be used” when the PP talks about “theft or treason”, he insisted. And he called for order: one thing is a legitimate criticism, another is that among the socialists “there is no room for equidistance or statements that, although minority and very personalist, reproduce without further analysis the arguments of our political adversaries”. A message that, in the literal sense, could well apply to Susana Díaz and her distance from the official line with Catalan financing…
“We are in a collective project, we cannot be at mass and ring the bell, either we are or we are not,” reiterated Espadas, who launched the message that “we have a project for Andalusia, but for the social majority,” contrary to the path of the PP government. “The only thing that advances in Andalusia with Moreno is the destruction of public health, education, dependency, the lack of control of spending and propaganda. And his salary.
