Pedro Sánchez hoping for strong showing from socialists as rightwing parties fight each other for votes

The man who has been mayor of Dos Hermanas for the past 35 years offers two words when asked to explain the Spanish socialist party’s enduring success in Andalucía: biological memory.

“Andalucíans are very aware of their origins,” says Francisco Toscano. “This used to be a very class-conscious society in all the wrong ways. Like some other parts of Spain – such as Extremadura – we were always at the back of the queue when it came to economic development.”

Toscano, 69, still remembers the high rates of illiteracy among his fellow factory workers 40 years ago. These days, they are the parents of university graduates.

Dos Hermanas, which lies 10 miles south of Seville, may be better known as the hometown of Los del Río – the Spanish pop group best known for the international hit Macarena – but it has long been one of the key parts of the heartland of the socialist workers’ party (PSOE).

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It was not by accident that Pedro Sánchez came to the city at the beginning of last year to launch his successful bid to reclaim the leadership of the party.

While Toscano credits the PSOE with bringing about profound social change in the southern region it has ruled since 1982, there is also, he admits, “the fact that none of the other parties have offered a credible alternative over the years”.

They will have their chance on Sunday, when Andalucía goes to the polls to elect its next government.

The regional election will be the first electoral test for Sánchez, who became prime minister this summer after using a motion of confidence to dethrone the corruption-mired conservative People’s party (PP) of his predecessor Mariano Rajoy.

Sánchez, whose first months have seen him buffeted by a series of ministerial scandals and resignations, will be hoping that the PSOE manages to comfortably retain its grip on power in Andalucía and lose as few seats as possible.

At the last regional election in 2015, the PSOE won 47 seats out of 109, leading it to rely on the support of the centre-right Ciudadanos party.

The socialists, however, are not the only ones desperate for a good showing this weekend.

Even before the fall of the PP government and the departure of Rajoy, the Spanish right had faced an identity crisis that is fast becoming a geographical and ideological turf war.

The recession, corruption and the Catalan independence crisis have all served to weaken the PP’s claim to being the dominant party of the Spanish right. It reacted to its ejection from the Moncloa palace by choosing a younger leader, Pablo Casado, and swinging further to the right.

Ciudadanos, which had been riding high in the polls before taking the fateful decision to oppose Sánchez’s no-confidence motion, made a similar rightward lurch.

Meanwhile, the tiny far-right Vox party has begun to sense its moment has come, thanks to the Catalan crisis and the arrival of record numbers of migrants and refugees on Spain’s southern shore this year.

The extent of the fragmentation of the Spanish right has been on full view on the campaign trail.

The PP’s Casado has been engaging in revisionism over Spain’s imperial past. “We didn’t colonise,” he said recently, “what we did was achieve a greater Spain.”

The Ciudadanos leader, Albert Rivera, has refused to rule out a deal with Vox should the latter party pick up seats, while Vox itself has been basking in the media glow. Its president, Santiago Abascal – who has boasted of carrying a Smith & Wesson – appeared in a bizarre video shared on social media a fortnight ago, riding a horse as he led his posse across the southern plains to a suitably portentous soundtrack.

The video’s caption – “The reconquest will begin on the soil of Andalucía” – was a pointed reference to the long struggle to end the Moorish occupation of Spain between 711 and 1492.

“Even if Vox don’t get any seats, the way that Casado talks is clearly a strategy to avoid losing votes to Vox,” says Luis Cornago, an analyst at the political risk advisory firm Teneo.

“Vox may not be in the electoral arena, but they can contaminate the discussion and that’s what these parties do … they shift the discussion to the right – especially on immigration and the Catalan issue.”

Meanwhile, Sánchez’s recent, tough line on negotiating Spain’s role in Gibraltar’s post-Brexit future will not have damaged the PSOE’s chances in the looming election, says Toscano. “The Gibraltar issue does win votes because it shows that the left can also work to defend the kind of values that the right is making a patriotic farce out of.”

Still, the mayor adds, when he talks to voters, the most common concerns they raise are about “the basic, human stuff” – unemployment, education and healthcare.

The latter two issues are top of the list for David Pérez, a 34-year-old hospital laundry worker from Dos Hermanas. He says he cannot trust any of the main parties to deliver on either area.

“I’ve voted in the past – for the PSOE, the PP and Podemos – but I’m not going to vote this time and neither are my wife, my dad or my uncle,” he says. “It’s all the same, whoever you vote for.”

Such disenchantment suggests that it is not just the Spanish right that is fragmenting. The advent of the anti-austerity Podemos party has put pressure on the PSOE just as the emergence of Ciudadanos and Vox did on the PP.

Sitting on a tiled bench outside the town hall, Rocío Domínguez is more fixed on her imminent job interview than what happens on Sunday.

The 29-year-old is still deciding how to cast her ballot; while she likes some of what she hears from the Podemos-led coalition Adelante Andalucía, she worries about their tendency to contradict themselves.

The main parties, says Domínguez, ought to be working to provide jobs and opportunities for struggling young people. “I think the PP and Ciudadanos are more the parties of the people with money. All of Spain needs a change but I can’t see a lot of changes under [regional PSOE leader] Susana Díaz.”

What about Vox? “They’re backward morons who’ve had it drummed into them from a young age,” she says. “They’re harking back to Spain’s past.”