Elections in Castilla y León: The CIS stands out and leaves the future of Castilla y León in the local parties | Spain

The pre-electoral survey of the Center for Sociological Research (CIS) for the autonomous 13-F in Castilla y León has surprised this Wednesday with a controversial result in which the PP and the PSOE appear virtually tied, and in which neither of the two main contenders would reach an absolute majority (located at 41 seats) not even associating with Vox and United We Can. The difference in estimated votes between the two parties is one point –PSOE, 30.8% and PP, 29.8%– and two seats in the best and worst projections. The work estimates a very wide range of attorneys, something that leaves the stage open to different government pacts, in which not only parties such as Vox, United We Can and Citizens would enter, but also regionalist parties such as the Union of the Leonese People, provincial brands such as For Ávila –split from the PP– or members of the Empty Spain platform, such as Soria ¡Ya!. These formations, according to the CIS, could jointly reach up to seven attorneys and be decisive in forming investiture majorities.

When the popular president of Castilla y León, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, decided to bring forward the elections, he argued for the lack of loyalty of his until then government partner, Ciudadanos, and for the need to govern without those ties, with more support and alone. . Mañueco wanted to repeat in his own way the wave of enthusiasm caused by Madrid’s president Isabel Díaz Ayuso by anticipating the elections on May 4 in Madrid. The national leader of the PP, Pablo Casado, supported this idea, in need of an electoral victory on his long road to La Moncloa whose merit is not attributed to Díaz Ayuso.

The survey published by the public body chaired by José Félix Tezanos, on the eve of the official start of the 13-F campaign, largely breaks those triumphant expectations for the PP and opens up much more scope for speculation. The PSOE – which was already the most voted force in the previous elections, in which it obtained 35 seats – would now obtain between 25 and 34 attorneys. The PP, which achieved 29 three years ago, would be between 27 and 32. Ciudadanos, which in 2019 surprised with 12 prosecutors and allowed the PP to chain 36 consecutive years of government, would now drop to between two and five. United We Can would improve its two current representatives to between three and five. And Vox, which currently only had one attorney, would rise to between four and eight, far from the much more optimistic forecasts projected in other private media surveys. Neither the theoretically foreseeable alliances of the PP with Vox nor the PSOE with Podemos would reach the 41 seats required for an absolute majority.

These open CIS forecasts were made after fieldwork carried out on 7,130 interviews in the nine provinces of the region, between January 7 and 22. On January 7, the controversy began to break out precisely due to a previous interview with the Minister of Consumer Affairs, Alberto Garzón, to The Guardian, in which he pointed to the poorer quality of meat from large farms compared to extensive livestock, which generated a controversy used by the PP and the right that lasted several weeks. The CIS also asks about the main concerns of the inhabitants of Castilla y León and the one that comes out in the first place very prominently is depopulation (30.1%). Among the 45 problems corroborated on this scale, macro-farms are not included.

In most of the parameters analyzed by this CIS, the two major parties in dispute, PSOE and PP, are technically tied, but the Socialists are ahead in direct voting intention, in vote plus sympathy, in being considered a party closer to voter ideas. However, 70% of those asked predict that the PP will win and only 9.3% say that the PSOE will.

26.9% of those questioned are still undecided and 30% respond that they will cast their vote in the last week of the campaign.

Soria ¡Now!: two or three seats

To this tableau of unknowns we must add what will finally be the strength and direction of the vote of the provincial parties, which burst into or notably increase their representation. The CIS grants two to three seats to Soria ¡Ya!, the most established of the five provincial parties that is presented under the umbrella of the Empty Spain platform. The historic regionalist Union of the Leonese People (UPL) party, which claims an autonomous community with León, Zamora and Salamanca and currently maintains an attorney, would also rise to two or three seats. For Ávila, formed by a local split from the PP, he would retain his current parliamentarian. The case of Soria Now! It is the most striking, because it would become the first force in the province, with 42.3% of the votes and between two and three attorneys.

Tezanos explains that the difficulty of this work, and the variety in the range of predictions, has to do with the fact that in Castilla y León, unlike what happened in Madrid on 4-M, elections are held in nine districts in which that the five major parties concur (all with options for seats) and forces at the provincial level: “All this means that the last seats in practically all the Castilian-Leonese constituencies are decided by differences of very few votes, which are difficult to estimate by surveys”.