The president of the Government and PSOE candidate, Pedro Sánchez, this Thursday will give the starting signal for the campaign for the general elections of 29 November with an event in Seville, while the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, will do the same in Badalona (Catalonia). In turn, the president of Vox, Santiago Abascal, and the candidate of Frente Amplio, Ada Colau, have decided to kick off in Madrid.
At midnight, the campaign for the general elections begins officially, in which the heads of the lists will travel around the country requesting support in the ballot boxes for their formations, through the usual rallies and election events held across all of Spain.
At the same time, the candidates of the four main forces at the state level will face each other in debates organized by the Academia de Televisión. Although dates and format are still to be finalized, a head-to-head between Sánchez and Feijóo is being considered and a four-way debate in which Abascal and Colau will also participate.
Sánchez repeats Seville as a starting point
The head of the Executive and candidate for reelection will kick off the campaign with a rally at the Auditorio Fibes in Seville, a space usual for the PSOE and where the party held its most recent federal Congress.
Sánchez is once again betting on the Andalusian capital to premiere the campaign, in the same way that he did in the two general elections of 2019. In the previous elections, those of July 2023, the kickoff was moved to Madrid.
The socialists arrive at the last two weeks before the appointment at the ballot boxes after an intense pre-campaign led by Sánchez, which was abruptly interrupted by the rail tragedy in Urda (Toledo).
Feijóo chooses Badalona, backed by Albiol
Alberto Núñez Feijóo has decided to formally open the campaign in Badalona (Barcelona), accompanied by the mayor of the city and PP candidate for the Congress for Barcelona, Xavier García Albiol.
The Partido Popular chooses Catalonia for its kickoff, aware that it is a decisive territory for aspiring to La Moncloa due to the high number of seats it allocates (48 out of 350). Currently, the conservatives have six deputies (five for Barcelona and one for Tarragona), but they trust in improving their results in the province of Barcelona and obtaining representation in Lleida and Girona.
Feijóo, who will have the backing during the campaign of his regional barons and of the former Presidents of the Government José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy, will travel around Spain in these 15 days with the central message of demanding support for the “change” and a “national reconstruction”.
Abascal returns to Columbus, an emblematic site for Vox
The leader of Vox has chosen Madrid’s Plaza de Colón to inaugurate his campaign on November 29. It is a place with a strong symbolic charge for the party, which has organized mass rallies and events there with tens of thousands of attendees.
Abascal arrives at this start of the campaign after a very intense pre-campaign throughout the country, in which he has visited more than two dozen provinces since the electoral advance was announced a little over a month ago.
Vox faces the rush of poster pasting after a week marked by Abascal’s interview on “La Revuelta”, in which the presenter himself, David Broncano, confessed to regretting not using comedy and letting the audience choose. “I fucked it up”, he admitted. In the opinion of the Vox leader, Broncano “didn’t do well” in the interview because of pressure from the left.
Ada Colau kicks off in Madrid and looks toward Seville
The candidate of Frente Amplio, the Catalan Ada Colau, has decided to start the campaign in Madrid with a rally alongside the head of the list for the capital, Emilio Delgado (Más Madrid), the IU leader Toni Valero and the leader of Movimiento Sumar, Verónica Martínez.
For the traditional poster-pasting, they have chosen the Puente de Vallecas district, one of the historic strongholds of the alternative left in Madrid, known for its deep-rooted awareness of the working class.
On Friday, the candidate will dedicate the day to attending to the media and giving interviews. Thus, Colau’s first major campaign event will take place in Seville, a key constituency for the coalition because it is one of the communities that elects the most MPs and where, in these elections, there is high fragmentation on the left of the PSOE, with up to three lists (Frente Amplio, Podemos and Adelante Andalucía).
Irene Montero also starts her campaign in Madrid
In the case of Podemos, its candidate and former Minister of Equality, Irene Montero, will also kick off the campaign in Madrid at an event alongside the general secretary of the purple party, Ione Belarra.
On Friday, he is scheduled to hold his first campaign rally in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid) and, subsequently, travel to Palma de Mallorca to take part in an event with the head of the list of ERC, Gabriel Rufián, within the framework of the collaboration agreement that both forces maintain in these elections.
The Balearic case constitutes an exception, since the alternative left has managed to put together a single-unit candidacy. Ara Més closed a coalition with the parties of Frente Amplio and, subsequently, Podemos reached an agreement with the Balearic formation to be included on the lists as independents (in number three spot).