Ricardo Lacruz had the happy idea of looking for the email address of Pedro Sánchez in the Congress of Deputies and send you a picture of the era in which they studied together in the college of Santa Cristina, in Madrid. In the picture it looks to Sanchez, the highest of their peers, playing the flute in what appears to be a function of end-of-course. “I’m the guitarist”, he explained Lacruz in the text. The president replied with a terse “I am glad to know you, a hug”. Lacruz interpreted that the friend who invited him the day of his birthday to the movies and out to dinner at Burger King gave long.

Sanchez has often led to gala be of Tetuan, a working-class neighbourhood, and study in the public school Ramiro de Maeztu. What the old friend was coming to remind him, or so he believes, at least, is that before you get to that progressive institution was in a private school and religious where the two of them did a duet of flute and guitar. Lacruz is warmed up with the answer style customer service of a company and wrote a new message in which he reproached that would never have spoken in public of their passage through this school. Sanchez did not answer this time. It seems unlikely that these two again go together to the cinema.

Sanchez, perhaps to enhance a part of your past and stop in the shade a different time zone because some vote more than others. In puridad, the socialist candidate to the elections of the 10-N raised in the district madrileño de Tetuán, although not in the area of multicultural and left-wing, but in a more down, which borders the Paseo de la Castellana and the financial district. Paradoxically, Sanchez has much more support among the streets of the neighborhood that he frequented less than in which he spent his childhood, where in the last election —does nothing, six months— they would rather have Paul Married, the leader of the PP.

In what is considered the neighborhood classic of Tetuán, Bravo Murillo, and all the streets around, the repeat elections does not seem to have demobilized the people. Rafael Happy and Daniel Sanchez, two friends standing in front of a betting house that opened a few months ago, heard for the first time in their lives that Sanchez lived near here.

—Not what I’ve heard I never that, are you sure? I knew that here lived Camilo Sesto, but not this lord…

it Is the same. Feliz, a dominican of 51 years, says that he would leave in The Moncloa for “an eternity”. “The man speaks with the heart”, he says. Daniel Sanchez, of 45 years, added that his namesake surname “value to the worker”. Binds to the talk improvised a mason, Jose Heredia, who minces no words or hesitation: “I’m going to vote”.

Until a few weeks ago was filled with a certain pessimism in the neighborhood by the fact that Sanchez and Pablo Iglesias would not have been able to reach an agreement that would avoid the repetition of the elections. However, in the last few months people have been mobilized for a particular cause, the bookies that have grown like mushrooms in the last year, as in other poor neighborhoods of Madrid. “There are the big ideas that move the society now, but the little things, which are concrete. And two weeks ago met a lot of people against the houses of the game,” explains Emeritus Sánchez, of the association of neighbors Cuatro Caminos-Tetuán.

The demonstration carried a banner that read Outside betting houses in our neighborhoods. It became crowded. The neighbors demanded that it stop opening this kind of business, especially near schools or institutes. Consider the great addiction of the TWENTY-first century. Emeritus Sanchez believed that there was a way to mobilize a society beauty and to remind them that, as a few decades ago, had to go to the street to try to change things.

The associations of neighbors as Emeritus are faced with others who, like Mary, an activist from the neighborhood, they believe that Tetouan has entered into a process of degradation by the proliferation of narcopisos, afterhours, floors with heated beds and the presence, documented by the police, gangs such as the Trinitarios. A known gang member, was murdered two years ago in these narrow streets, and with the aroma of a village. Mary claims to be threatened by his complaint to the face of a situation that is considered unsustainable. The police presence is constant, as this afternoon, that gives you the high to a man on a bicycle and flip flops. In the fall, a man in flip flops is suspicious.

—what Is yours?, he asks a police officer, pointing at the bike.

—Yes, friend.

The officers frisk and didn’t find anything. Does not seem to be one of those young narcos in the neighborhood that you pass by bike. The cyclist is running by pedaling with the gesture mocking.

a couple of streets from the now full of betting houses lived the child Pedro Sanchez, though in a very different reality. This area of the madrid district in which converge the roads Aviator Zorita and Hernani has more to do with the street of Orense, very commercial area next to Santiago Bernabéu stadium and its surrounding buildings. There it is possible to find many floors with 200 square meters of surface.

Calle Orense, the area’s most prosperous neighbourhood of Tetuán, on Thursday, ALVARO GARCIA

Quique Love lived in what is now the Tetouan of the bookies and is not crossed with the child that would grow up to be president until they agreed on the basketball team of the Ramiro de Maeztu, the Students. “An uncle, a hard worker, always met. Never escaqueaba. It came out a little bit of the rules. Generous with the team,” recalls Love.

That capacity of work of the leader of the PSOE —which belonged for years to the grouping socialist in the neighborhood— you must apply it during this electoral campaign in the places where he grew up. In the building where he lived, as if it were a summary of this tour of Tetouan, the opinions were split in two, as two equal parts of an orange. A man with a briefcase and jacket that comes out of the portal the real question is if Sanchez is left-wing: “do you Live here? This is actually not a left-wing”. Five minutes appears a woman who claims to be called Ana. Go right by the door through which entrance to casa Sanchez 30 years ago. She, of 59, not to be crossed ever, because he did not come to live here until 2009. Are you going to vote?

—Not that it will vote, is that what I just did. I voted by mail. If you don’t vote for all, earn the right.

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