He keeps his leadership intact, there are no provincial fires (not even in Seville), he is about to approve a brutal regional budget of 51,597 million euros for 2026 without the need to seek support and all the polls give him a winner, but Juan Manuel Moreno (Barcelona, 55 years old) exits with a staggered step the 17th Regional Congress of the PP which ends this Sunday.
For a serious unforeseen error, for mismanagement not detected in time (and for a long time) of which he had no idea and which forced him to drop from the halo of the absolute majority in which he found himself. And all eight months before the Andalusian elections. “They gave me no information. I got very angry. It made me very angry,” he said Monday during the launch of his book Coexistence manual. The Andalusian road (Espasa), written with the help of four journalists who work at the Board.
This Sunday, the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, will close the Andalusian popular conclave, in which Moreno will be re-elected president and candidate for the Council. Almost simultaneously, demonstrations in defense of public health were called in the eight Andalusian provinces, organized by the unions Mareas Blancas, CCOO and UGT (their general secretaries were present at the inauguration on Friday) and from which Satse and CSIF, the majority of the sector, withdrew.
Healthcare management is his Achilles’ heel – he has appointed four directors in almost seven years of tenure – a permanent headache, now worse. To the eight and a half million potential users of the Andalusian Health Service (SAS), there is no need to explain much about the service: they know it because they have it just a click of a button away on their mobile application. But when in the Andalusian Parliament the spokesperson of Por Andalucía, Inma Nieto, showed the mammogram of Anabel’s breast something creaked because it graphically showed the fragility of the system. The perfect election launchpad designed for the start of the campaign in September had potholes and no one knew it. “The ideal situation has been lost,” points out a veteran leader.
Moreno is the second longest-serving president of the Junta de Andalucía, after Manuel Chaves (19 years). And he already notices that there is a bit of fresh air blowing in the street, another thing he hadn’t noticed before. On October 3, at the inauguration of a health center in Marbella, he received applause and even shouts of “get out, get out!” and it wasn’t the first time. They called for his resignation in other calls. When he became president in January 2019, all the official photos of the Andalusian government were taken in front of the imposing façade of the San Telmo palace. An old image showing the penultimate Health Minister, who resigned a month ago, is still published on the Council’s website. Will there be an official photo on the street?
Popular ones are now breathing easier than 40 days ago, when journalist Mercedes Díaz, from Radio Sevilla (Cadena SER), revealed the first cases. They believe they have acted well: by acknowledging mistakes, asking for forgiveness, with dismissals and resignations and by announcing shock plans which for now do not translate into new hires because there is no professionalism or attractive incentives. They believe the problem is mainly in the Virgen del Rocío hospital in Seville. “There is no echo anywhere else,” they say from San Telmo. The opposition is very dissatisfied because it has not heard in Parliament – the place where all governments must explain – what and why the delays in mammographic diagnoses occurred.
“There was no Carlos Mazón,” a senator assesses with relief. “The problem is coming to light,” says a congressman. “Little by little everything will be resolved,” says an Andalusian parliamentarian. “There are victims, let’s hope it doesn’t get worse,” warns another leader surprised by the lack of communication in managing the crisis.
Stability
Moreno will cling to the message of stability in Andalusia, as he already did in the June 2022 campaign, to support his political bid of serenity and moderation, which he believes has brought economic growth, jobs and investment. “You can get an absolute majority; if you lose it, the Andalusians won’t realize what they are losing,” he said on Monday.
Various sources underline that we should focus everything on this topic, not open the field to the hypothesis of post-electoral pacts and not allow ourselves to be contaminated by what happens in other communities. “We continue to be an island of stability, without noise or shriek,” several sources say. “Andalusia has created its own political dynamic. It does not allow itself to be influenced by other situations and this only happens in the Basque Country, Catalonia, Galicia and Andalusia”, says a popular official. Others reply that this will not be possible: “If they reach an agreement in Valencia, what will they say, not here?”
The biggest threat to the PP does not come from the PSOE of Andalusia, once the hegemonic party in Spain’s most populous community. “The PSOE is not an alternative, it is under 30 deputies (out of 109 in the Parliament of Andalusia, its electoral base) and will remain like the PP with Gabino Puche or Antonio Hernández Mancha, who did not reach 26,” several leaders who manage internal polls state without hesitation. According to this data, the socialist candidate María Jesús Montero, who opposes Moreno by proxy, given his multitasking in the Government as first vice president and minister of Finance, does not use the PSOE brand. “The only growing force is Vox. This is not something exclusive to Andalusia but to all of Europe. A sociological change is taking place, there is a clear right-wing current and this benefits Vox,” says a prominent PP leader.
In the setback caused by the screening crisis, several PP sources see a positive development. “There are people in the party who took the result for granted and this is not guaranteed. It helped take away the drowsiness,” say sources close to Moreno. “It was very nice to put pressure on the party teams, nothing is taken for granted and we must act together,” says a PP deputy.
Veterans do not remember a convention whose motto is Always Andalusia and in which the color green replaced blue – so calm, there is not even an internal turmoil. It is logical: the PP governs in the Council, in seven of the eight capitals (all except Jaén), in six councils (all except Jaén and Seville), in 189 municipal councils (the most populated), which translates into a network of institutional positions distributed throughout the Andalusian territory. But Moreno has given life back to a financially healthy party (it has no debts), which has always been very presidentialist and cuchipanda, but which has become more professional with the arrival of Antonio Repullo as the general secretariat. He is the architect of a “cultural change” in the organization based above all on listening. “We open the windows so that there are fewer slogans and more system; fewer occurrences and more data; and if there is something that doesn’t work, we change it.” In reality, the PP became a copy of what was the all-powerful Andalusian PSOE until it forgot how to win elections.
