Andalusia, the autonomous community of Spain which leads the state's unemployment statistics ―with 22.5% registered as out of work, compared to 14.8% in Spain as a whole, and a stratospheric 46% of joblessness among the under-25s, faces a regional election on Sunday in which everything points to another win for the Socialists, the party that has emerged victorious in every vote for the last 40 years, with the sole exception of 2012, where the Popular Party finished first but without enough seats to form a government. Apparently, no alternative is possible, despite Andalusia's position at the tail-end of Spain in many indicators and with institutional corruption, as revealed in the major ERE corruption case, which has seated two former Andalusian presidents in the dock, with the great likelihood that one of them, José Antonio Griñán, will end up in jail. To hear the current president, Susana Díaz, at the close of the campaign in Seville, saying that, with these figures, her party has fulfilled 100% of its electoral programme and, without so much as a blush, adding that they could have even done more, is almost an insult to intelligence
But neither unemployment nor corruption was a central focus in a campaign that, for much of the time, put the spotlight more on Catalonia than on Andalusia. Anti-Catalan sentiment, used as a central argument by a right which wanted to attack Susana Díaz for the Socialists' reliance on the support of the pro-independence Catalan parties for the investiture of Pedro Sánchez as Spanish prime minister. What was Díaz going to say, attacked on a flank that the Spanish prime minister, her declared archenemy, had left vulnerable. When she herself had the habit of hoisting the flag of anti-Catalanism more than anyone else.
If we assume that Díaz will win, the intrigue on Sunday night will be reduced to the struggle between the PP and Ciudadanos for second place - Casado versus Rivera, two clones who are very difficult to tell apart - and the entry into the Andalusian chamber of Vox, the Francoist, xenophobic party which has serious options of winning seats, according to the surveys. Yet it's really not that strange that the Francoism which is present in other institutions of the Spanish state should also enter openly into an autonomous community's parliament.
Still, if they did so, it would be the first time that it had happened and the political earthquake on the right would be clear. Almeria will be the bellwether on election night and will indicate if the vote that former PP leader José María Aznar managed to gather around him in the 2000 general elections, has now dispersed to become completely unrecognizable.