Group therapy in the PSOE | Spain

Without debate about Pedro Sánchez’s team in Ferraz or discussion of ideological background, what the socialists are doing this weekend in Seville is a kind of group therapy and sharing about what is happening to them on the eve of what that can happen. The 41st Congress of Seville has been conceived as a necessary procedure to start the organic clock and little else. Maybe wait for a sign from Pedro Sánchez this Sunday that indicates that he will do it again, that he will be able to put luck on his side again.

The socialist leader said after the summer storm over Catalan financing that this meeting was going to serve to “align” the territorial discourse, but what Ferraz has done is avoid the substantive debate by seeking a generic agreement in which everyone feels recognized. The party organs were absent in the controversial PSC and ERC pact on financing and the definition and future specification of that model will be done later. There are leaders who privately acknowledge their frustration at the superficiality of many discussions, but they are quick to respond themselves: “With a daily national emergency, what we are doing is defending ourselves.”

That is what this 41st Socialist Congress is, a congress on the defensive, which claims in its motto that Spain advances on the leftbut which has not managed to open the focus on the great debates and threats that Spain faces, nor even turn the congress into a showcase of socialist management. None of that is being a priority in this conclave that is, above all, about licking its wounds. In self-help interventions in all types of formats and in quiet conversations in a corner. No rush, no hectic this weekend. There are those who are sharpening their knives for the battle that is coming in their territories, but without ever drawing it.

The uncertainty about what will happen in the coming months and years is not new for the socialists, no Sánchez mandate has been built on safe ground, but the feeling that many share and that the socialist leadership encourages is that they are victims of persecution and the siege. “They experimented here before,” they commented in the Andalusian delegation on the day of the official rehabilitation of Manuel Chaves and José Antonio Griñán, the former presidents convicted by the Supreme Court and protected by the Constitutional Court last July. Chaves and Griñán, erased for years by their party, were stopped by militants to take photos and hug them, to vindicate them after the PSOE had reworked its story about the perimeter of corruption in the ERE case and the “hunt” that they denounce to remove them from power.

In the newspaper archive for the memory of the PSOE there will be that image of the return of the former Andalusian presidents and the speeches of two new opening acts: Diana Morant and Unai Sordo. The leader of the Valencian socialists was moved by the pain of the Dana catastrophe and the general secretary of the Workers’ Commissions encouraged the socialists in the face of “the greatest risk of social and political involution since the end of the Second World War” and the need for “the public to save society.” In the PSOE they hope that this Sunday, in the speech of his fourth proclamation, it will be Pedro Sánchez who takes the reins of the socialist spirit.