“They are wrong, because women are not enemies, we have done nothing to them.” This is the reaction of Ángela Claverol, president of Amama, the association of Andalusian women suffering from breast cancer, to the statements of some representatives of the Andalusian PP who in recent weeks have tried to minimize the screening crisis. “They should focus on women, solve the problem and explain where the failure was, not attack us or relativize it. They will say that there are few cases, but we are already working on 220 trials that we are preparing”, he confirms in a conversation with this newspaper.
A week ago, after the meeting that Claverol had with the Minister of Health, Antonio Sanz, Amama underlined in a statement that he had “showed his total and absolute disagreement and indignation at the accumulation of slander that is published against the association and also against its members”. The entity was alluding, among other things, to the tweet that the parliamentary spokesperson of the Andalusian PP, Toni Martín, published on the same Sunday in which almost 10,000 people gathered in front of the San Telmo Palace to criticize the management of the screening crisis by the government of Juan Manuel Moreno, in which he described the protest as an “absolute failure of the left-wing parties and the unions”. Furthermore, it did so a few minutes after the Local Police of Seville had reported that 4,500 people had participated in the event, a count that has never been done by this entity and which was later denied by the National Police, which is the one that collects this data, and which almost doubled that figure: 8,500 demonstrators.
The following day, it was the Prime Minister himself who disavowed his spokesperson to assure that “it is never a failure for citizens to demonstrate freely, it is always a success”. A question that some councilors have also raised in private. But the rudeness towards women who are victims of delays in diagnostic screening does not end there. Last Friday, popular MP Pablo Venzal, from Moreno’s closest circle, assured a parliamentary commission that those affected by the failures of the breast cancer prevention program “will certainly be counted on one hand, no matter how much we shout.” The day before, a PP councilor from Hinojos (Huelva) had repeated the same argument in plenary: “All this noise for the 1%”.
A priori These statements may show a disconnect in the strategy to address the screening crisis, when compared with the more conciliatory messages launched by the Andalusian government. To Moreno’s words we must add the change in attitude of the Minister of Health, who began by asking the women of Amama to stop launching “false stories” to report the alleged disappearance of medical records and ended up proposing to Claverol to study all the association’s complaints on a case-by-case basis and admit that the popular spokesperson had made a mistake. This Wednesday he winked at them by replacing the former director of the Virgen del Rocío, Manuel Molina, with whom Amama did not maintain good relations, in his position as territorial delegate for Health with Silvia Pino, councilor of the Municipality of Seville and with an excellent relationship with the association. But, according to the analysts interviewed, this divergence is due to a PP plan that serves both its voters, who do not consider that privatization is deteriorating public healthcare, and those who might stop mobilizing in favor of the PP – the borrowed vote that supported Moreno’s absolute majority -, disappointed by its healthcare management.
“Active listening on social networks to the crisis in Andalusia allows us to see that there are two discourses that clash and are polarized, the one critical of the Council and the one that does not question the damage to healthcare”, explains Ana Salazar, political scientist and CEO of the consultancy firm Idus3. “The Moreno government is interested in having a dialogue in its favor and is interested in sending messages to these two groups,” he adds. The Executive assures that the political debate on this crisis is mobilizing PP voters “who were sleeping a lot”, according to the interlocutors consulted.
Divide in a less polarized context
The Moreno government recognizes that the failures in the screening program were a tremendous mistake – “a mistake,” several sources agree – and does not even hide that part of the difficulty in addressing this crisis lies in the fact that those affected are women with breast cancer. But they also defend, along the same line followed by Venzal, that the scale of the problem is not that great and criticize the opposition and the media for exaggerating for electoral purposes. “I felt overwhelmed and helpless for not having had information before and because for a month all Spanish television stations were dedicated to the subject, when similar things happen in other territories and the decibels were not raised”, Moreno himself acknowledged this Monday during the presentation of his memoirs.
There, as Venzal has already done – to whom he dedicates a chapter of the book -, the Andalusian president also put numbers to limit the proportion of the issue: “In a community that carries out 1,100,000 screenings, which exclusively carries out half a million breast screenings per year and half a million per year, we have had 97% of the cases concentrated on the Virgen del Rocío as a consequence of a problem of order that occurs within the public health system”, said Moreno, also if he then recognized that “even if it was only a woman who had to wait and find herself in uncertainty, it was a failure, a disappointment in the system”, he moved on to political reproach. “It is true that mistakes happen, but in Andalusia there has been a particular interest in distorting reality.” “I am disappointed in the way things can be manipulated, intentionally and others unintentionally,” he added.
The screening scandal caught the communication and strategy team of the Andalusian PP by surprise, which did not consider the risk of unmasking Moreno himself in a press conference after the Government Council; nor did he warn her that she should not say in public that it had been decided not to notify the women of the dubious findings, so as not to generate “anxiety” in them.
As time passed, the Executive wanted to take control of the situation, albeit with a somewhat surprising reaction, which involves confrontation with women victims of breast cancer, a decision that contrasts with the moderation that Moreno himself advertises in his memoirs. “The strategy of the good cop and the bad cop is archetypal in communication and is useful because it gives the people arguments to defend themselves, but it is useful in a very polarized scenario, and the Andalusian himself is not the model of that polarized scenario, because Moreno himself has taken on the responsibility of profiting in a softer scenario in which he can attract PSOE voters,” warns Sergio Pascual, political analyst and former Podemos MP.
Antonio Conde, president of the Association of Political Scientists of Andalusia, also questions this polarization strategy. “Trying to discredit such an important group as that of women in breast cancer advocacy and help will not do the PP much good, because when it comes to choosing the one that does not have a predefined vote, it will choose the side of the victims and not the government,” he warns.
There is still a lot of time to know how this crisis will end. Within the Board of Directors, we also want to wait for the effects of the shock plans for projections, before analyzing their consequences at the most critical moment. The Government believes that the failures in the prevention program do not give votes to either the PSOE or Vox and only affect the disenchanted center-left that supported Moreno in 2022. But what is true, as Salazar underlines, is that until now the figure of the popular leader “had never been at the center of any crisis and now he is fully involved in it”, to the point that cries of “Moreno resign” can already be heard at rallies. something unheard of until last month.
