End of a cycle or end of a regime (Ignacio Camacho in El ABC)

In El ABC, Ignacio Camacho argues that the elections of 29 November 2026 are not just a choice between continuity and alternation, but between the survival of the constitutional system and its transformation into an autocracy. The columnist frames the election call as the forced outcome of a term without approved budgets.

The call for elections on **29 November 2026** has ceased to be a formality and become a plebiscite. At least that is how **Ignacio Camacho** reads it in the pages of **El ABC**. His thesis is uncomfortable for everyone: what is being voted on that day is not a programme or a team, but the very architecture of Spain's 1978 constitutional system. The alternative he describes is not left versus right, but democratic survival versus autocratic transformation.

## An early election born of exhaustion

**Pedro Sánchez** called the election after losing the parliamentary majority that sustained his government. In any conventional democracy, that is the norm: when there are no votes to govern, the word goes back to the electorate. Camacho notes that the prime minister presented this forced decision as a voluntary gesture of generosity, almost a gracious concession, when in reality it responded to a breakdown of trust impossible to hide.

The figure that underpins that exhaustion is stark: the government failed to pass a single budget in four fiscal years. Four years without approved public accounts is an anomaly that in other countries would have triggered elections far sooner. The dissolution of the Chambers, therefore, is not a bold gamble but the admission of a political failure.

Camacho describes Sánchez's appearance at the Moncloa as a rally from the institutional podium. The tone, he says, announces two months of all-out confrontation. The government is gambling its survival on a single card: inflaming the street and stirring the historical ghost of the two Spains.

## The arithmetic that favours the change bloc

The polls published before the announcement should be taken with caution because they reflect a mood prior to the announcement. Even so, Camacho stresses that the combined lead of the right is wide enough to make a comeback difficult in just a few weeks. The growth of the conservative vote over the last two years, more on the far-right flank than the moderate one, is well established.

That differential, according to the columnist, practically guarantees a joint majority for change. The range he handles is broad: perhaps closer to **180 seats** than to **200**. It is not a comfortable absolute majority, but it is enough to build an alternative if the **PP** and **Vox** stay calm and do not fall for provocation.

The government's strategy, Camacho anticipates, will be to push the adversary into unforced errors, the kind the right tends to commit in the final stretch of campaigns. If the conservative bloc avoids the turmoil, victory is within reach.

## The real goal: surviving inside the party

There is an alternative goal the columnist considers unconfessed. The government's effort is less about winning than about turning a foreseeable rout into a losing but decent result. That would allow Sánchez to aspire to keep the leadership of the **PSOE** (Spain's Socialist Party). Leaving power, Camacho recalls, always leaves many resentments, but a dignified result softens the fall.

To escape that threat of internal ousting, something more would be needed: a substantial improvement by **Sumar** and **Podemos**. Only a simultaneous recovery of both, which pollsters consider barely viable, would open the door to avoiding the upset. The process of vote absorption on the left flank, if it continues, keeps that initial goal within reach.

Camacho places the term within divisive rupture politics. He mentions an impunity law negotiated with its own beneficiaries, an agreement he calls simoniacal. The subsequent abandonment by the very people whose crimes were forgiven draws, in his view, a paradox of poetic justice.

## The judicial parenthesis that favours the government

There is one factor Camacho considers influential and that the official discourse does not acknowledge. In an electoral scenario, the custom of the administration of justice, not the legal rule, advises preserving the appearance of impartiality through a pause in ongoing political cases. That chance to stop the judicial clock prevents unpleasant surprises from surfacing during the campaign.

The columnist quantifies the scope of that parenthesis: more than a dozen corruption cases with more than **120 leaders, members or relatives** under investigation. Among them, Sánchez's vvife. The offences he lists include influence peddling, bribery, embezzlement of public funds, abuse of office and threats against judges and police officers.

The incivil horizon he describes is grave for the prime minister's circle. The leader's brother already has a conviction. A attorney general has been disqualified. A former minister remains in prison. In that context, the election means provisional relief from the risk of immediate accountability.

Camacho closes with a literary reference: Borges and Brecht, from opposing ideological standpoints, noted that there are folds of History where betrayal plays the role of a decisive advance. The quote is not an ornament. It is the bitter conclusion of someone watching a bloc built on an original sin end up devoured by its own foundations.