Given how the Partido Popular is running ever further to the right, there could come a time when, in the end, there's no difference between themselves and Vox. With Pablo Casado at the head of the party and with José María Aznar in the shadows weaving the different right-wing parties, political dinosaurs are back. For example, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, better known as MAR, who was spokesperson for the first Aznar government between 1996 and 1998 and who has since then worked first at the head of an important advertising company, later for his own communications firm and also as a controversial talking head.
Now he'll manage the campaign of the PP's candidate in the community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso. And he'll do so with two pearls behind him, as well as other niceties from his immeasurable collection. The first, when in 2014 he told the Antena 3 programme Espejo Público that Artur Mas "could do with a shooting". The second, his arrest by municipal police in Madrid for being four times over the drink driving limit after hitting three cars with his Mercedes.
MAR has been called in to compete with Vox and Ciudadanos, not to regain the centrist vote, something which in Madrid they don't know a lot about with the general drift of the right. To this has been added the rupture of Podemos by the Errejón wing. He, perhaps, doesn't have many followers, fewer than the formerly charismatic Pablo Iglesias, but, on the other hand, he gives prestige. The Iglesias-Errejón split and the latter's move to align himself with Madrid's mayor Carmena has blown up the left of PSOE to such an extent that it evokes the times of the Izquierda Unida smallholding. Let nobody kid themselves, it's probable that, in this context, their voters stay home and it doesn't benefit PSOE either, is as much need of support as they are, wherever it may come from.
The split in Podemos will lead to its radicalisation, something which doesn't do Pedro Sánchez any good either. This Tuesday he conceded his first major defeat in the Congress on the subject of apartment rents and the executive order which modified the PP's law on rental contract lengths from three years to five. It wasn't enough for Podemos and was a hint of what could happen to the budget, which the Spanish government can today almost give up for dead. It will be up to Sánchez to hold out in the Moncloa government palace as best he can and dream of a miracle. Because the other option, an election, would be certain defeat. And with the dinosaurs doing whatever they fancy.