Despite weeks and months of media hype, self-serving leaks and self-righteous speeches, the Socialist Party does not lose the support of women. On the contrary, it maintains a significant lead of more than five points in the female vote (28.5% against 23.1% male in the CIS in October).
The political and media right were confident that the scandal of the Ábalos case would serve to bridge that historical gap, but they were wrong. Their strategy failed because it was built on a fundamental mistake: they thought that one individual case, the behavior of one leader, was enough to erase 40 years of political and social progress led by socialist governments. That moral indignation would replace reasoned judgment. But the progressive women of our country have not confused a man’s behavior with the ideology of a party, nor his words and actions with the reality of the public policies promoted by his government. They were able to distinguish between personal betrayal and institutional loyalty to equality and freedom.
The right’s strategy has not been effective because it does not arise from sincere rejection and honest denunciation of undesirable behavior, but from the hope of ruining the successes of its socialist opponents. They don’t even try to make us forget that, for four decades, they have systematically opposed all the conquests that have expanded women’s freedom: divorce, abortion, the law on equality, sexual education, the fight against sexist violence. Why forget what once again, in some sectors of the right, is a clear purpose? The only thing they have done is try to validate a person’s behavior with their own collective politics of resistance to equality.
This equivalence is false and profoundly cynical. A personal betrayal of the PSOE’s values cannot be equated with a deliberate political history of opposition to women’s rights, practically transformed into the very banner of the party. One individual’s betrayal does not erase 40 years of reforms, laws and policies that have improved the lives of millions of women. Many of them should understand this well, because just as for a true believer the immoral behavior of a priest is no reason to stop believing in the teachings of the Gospel, no progressive woman will hand over her future to those who have denied it in the past; and they deny them in the present. We didn’t justify ourselves, we acted. We didn’t forgive, we expelled. This is the difference between a faith that takes refuge in absolution and a politics that is based on responsibility.
This is why the female vote did not move, as expected. Because women have understood the essential: that personal behavior may be repugnant, but it does not undermine the history, coherence and political commitment of a party which, with all its flaws, has always been on the side of their freedom and the equality of women. And if the October CIS demonstrates anything, it is precisely this: that strategies based on manipulation and contempt of citizen intelligence always end up in the mud from which they were born.
