Citizens place it as their fourth main concern, and it is expected to condition the citizen vote to a large extent
He May 28 the first major elections are held after the pandemic. Health is the fourth concern of citizens and there is no doubt that something will influence the vote, but experts believe that it will not define the electoral results.
According to the Center for Sociological Research (CIS), the citizens right now place the health in fourth place among your concerns, behind the problems of an economic nature, unemployment and political problems in general. Just a few months ago, it rose to be the third concern, coinciding with the mobilizations of the toilets.
The issue has taken on a certain entity in the electoral campaign and for the first time, health is the protagonist even in rallies, something that did not happen in previous elections.
In fact, the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, announced this Saturday a new game to improve the Primary Care at a meeting in which he dedicated practically his entire intervention to talking about health, as he did on Sunday, where his main message had to do with investment in mental health.
The PSOE will make health the axis of its next speeches in the remainder of the campaign.
“It is clear that the president of the government thinks that can condition the vote of many people”points out to EFE the expert in political science Ana Sofía Cardenal, who believes that the weight of health in the vote will vary and will affect above all the communities where there have been more mobilizations.
The subject has had on this occasion more presence also in electoral debatesmuch more than it had in previous moments, explains for his part the political scientist Luis Arroyo.
“Health and education have always been the two special axes of the social bloc, but I think that Right now there is a special sensitivity”focuses.
However, one thing that is so far behind that it will be difficult to assess is the management of governments during the pandemic because the electorate has a very short memory.
“You only need to see the voting expectations of one of the parties that were attacked the most for their mismanagement or for his misconception of the health system during the pandemic to verify that the memory of the electorate seems to have moved on to something else”, explains Toni Aira, professor of political communication at UPF-BSM.
But although the electorate has erased the pandemic from its memory, it does have more in mind the effects on the system thanks to the protests of the Primary Care toilets due to its conditions and the saturation of public services.
Demonstrations took place in Madrid and in other places such as Aragon, Navarra, Catalonia, the Valencian Community, Castilla-La Mancha, Andalusia and Extremadura. Its epicenter was Madrid, where thousands of people revealed in the streets the discontent of a part of the population with public health management.
In fact, according to the CIS, 39% of patients who were referred to a specialist in the last year had to wait more than three months to be seen and 26.4 percent of those who requested a consultation in Primary Care waited eleven days or more.
However, as explained to EFE by political scientist Luis Arroyo, president of the Ateneo de Madrid and the consultancy Asesores de Comunicación Pública, the perception that voters have of public services is not based on their own experiences but on what they see through Of the media.
For this reason, explains Arroyo, “If doctors take to the streets, people perceive that there is a problem” even if they themselves do not experience it, because perception goes far beyond objective data.
“Obviously the protests have an influence, for example in Madrid. Another thing is that this translates into Díaz Ayuso losing the majority, which probably not, because there are many other additional factors in addition to health, ”explains this political scientist. And he remarks: “There is the factor of who is the electoral alternative.”
Toni Aira points out that More Madrid has sought a very powerful communicative dichotomy around healthcare. “With the message ‘Health or Ayuso’ they have pointed to that ‘Communism or Freedom’ that she raised with great success,” explains this professor, who believes that the message has not penetrated beyond the most politicized population, and therefore They will have no consequences at the polls.
The political scientist Luis Arroyo maintains that yes, will influence but not decisively because, he says, only the economy has proven to be a defining element in electoral behavior.