Wednesday, March 27

The three challenges of a Feijóo on trial


Alberto Núñez Feijóo arrives at Congress together with Cuca Gamarra. / ep

The Galician leader has before him the challenge of forming a team that heals the internal wounds, find the winning tone of opposition to Sánchez and widen his electorate to shake off the shadow of Vox

lourdes perez

Between the slopes of the Compostela district of Casas Novas, where the Monte Pío Palace stands, the residence of the president of the Xunta de Galicia, and Madrid’s Calle de Génova 13 in Madrid, which still houses the strengths and weaknesses of the PP, there are 600 kilometers and a political universe. Alberto Núñez Feijóo knows well that journey between the domestic chambers of Galician power and the tempting expectations of the effervescent and overheated capital of Madrid, but until today he had always traveled it as a guest. With return ticket.

Entrenched in the security of four absolute majorities and stepping on a terrain – the country of the Galicians where he fishes for votes with pelagic nets – known by heart. If every political leader needs to be loved and required, Feijóo has run out of excuses to give up the comfort of Galician hegemony due to the uncertainty of whether he will be able to return to the PP “the broad majorities” that will catapult him back to Moncloa . In the midst of trauma due to the poisonous pulse between Pablo Casado and Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the party has become a clamor for the leader from Ourense, so used to leaving the polls on the shoulders, take the reins once and for all.

But politics -and particularly the one that unfolds on Madrid’s asphalt- is a specialist in transforming honeymoons into ice moons. And although Feijóo is going to brand new gallons enthroned, yes, in the extraordinary congress of the PP that raises the curtain today in Seville, he is still a leadership on trial. Proof of challenges and of his own ability to maneuver in an ecosystem where he plummets and not with the dozens of Galician words that describe rain.

The current spokesperson for the Popular Group, Cuca Gamarra. /

EP

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The unique and acclaimed candidacy of the still president of the Xunta has had an immediate soothing effect in these weeks of transition: a PP about to gobble up, eaten away by internal disputes, has calmed down with the change of direction of the barons, boosting Feijóo. And other impacts whose expansive wave is yet to be verified: the vindication of the hardened cadres in government responsibilities under the mandates of José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy; the more or less explicit revenge of those who were sidelined or had to leave due to the decisions of the Pablo Casado-Teodoro García Egea tandem; and the reactivation of the militants who have cornered the acts of Feijóo in his tour of the autonomous Spain of which, as he boasts, the PP would be the maximum exponent. The tribute to ‘aznarism’ – which Feijóo uses to varnish this crisis congress with the shine of the majorities of the past, the same as Casado did to win the presidency by promising a party without complexes – and the rescue of figures such as Esteban González Pons or Teófila Martínez, at 74 years old, point to the new leader’s determination to root his project in history; with the history of the winning PP, the only one that -on the other hand- he has embodied in Galicia. What remains to be seen is how Feijóo links in his team that praise of the past of electoral glory with the new blood. To his co-religionists who are more in tune with those who have been sacked after the forced departure of Casado and García Egea. The brilliant election, via tweet, of Cuca Gamarra as the new general secretary gives clues to pragmatism and conciliation. But also how Feijóo commands -and a lot- from the false legend of the indecisive.

Pedro Sánchez greets Nuñez Feijóo during the Conference of Presidents held in La Palma. /

RC

two.

The Opposition Model

Forced to have to expose himself more than usual and in a field that is not purely that of manager, Feijóo began with a minimum agreement with the Government of Pedro Sánchez at the Conference of Presidents of La Palma, which each interlocutor interpreted in his own way : the socialist leader clung to the unity of circumstances to avoid the pitfalls he was going to run into due to the socioeconomic impact of the war in Ukraine; and the Galician leader was left with the –vague- promise of tax cuts to say now “cheated” by the Moncloa tenant. Dressed with the poise of lifelong politics in front of a Sánchez a decade younger than him and after evicting a Casado who seemed beardless compared to the trienniums in power of the president of the Xunta, Feijóo has begun to draw a model of opposition that is going to stumble over the fact that he is not a deputy to be able to reply to Sánchez session after control session. A model that distances itself in the most pungent forms of ‘casadismo’, not so much in its combative background. The same Feijóo who has offered himself for State pacts from “constitutionalism, Europeanism and Atlanticism”, congratulating himself on being more loyal to the Government than United We Can as Sánchez’s partners, has accused the Executive of “lining money” with taxes despite to the part that harvest autonomies like the one that he still heads; of being the “worst” possible address for Spain since the restoration of democracy; and of being commanded by a “despotic” and “autistic” president, the latter description that led to the protest of an association that watches over those who suffer from this pathology. The newly elected leader of the PP awaits the validation of the decree of shock measures against the inflationary crisis exacerbated by the war and the turn in the historical position of Spain on Morocco. Sánchez, according to the popular leader, has made it “very difficult” to say “yes” to the emergency plan. But it is almost impossible for him to say ‘no’ to a package of initiatives that relieves his voters and the citizenry as a whole. Feijóo wears the halo of the moderate pactist. In reality, his four absolute majorities in Galicia have meant that he has never been forced to ally himself or give in to anyone.

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Mañueco shakes hands with Juan García-Gallardo (Vox) after the government agreement in Castilla y León. /

EP

What works for Feijóo for Sánchez – “I’m not here to insult him, I’m here to beat him” – could also be done with Vox. Every time he is questioned about the far-right formation, the Galician president strives to draw a line between the acronym -from which he distances himself- and its militants, many of them filtered from the ranks of the PP as water escapes from a broken faucet. The role of the leader of the Xunta in the negotiations that have led to the inaugural entry of Vox in the Government of Castilla y Léon, severely questioned within the popular Europeans to whom the party has worked after to have some of its most visible faces -Weber, Metsola and Schinas- at the Seville congress. But if he wanted to prove something, it is that it has been the hand of Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, not his, that has rocked the coalition with those of Santiago Abascal, who are making the investiture of the Castilian-Leon president beg. “Sometimes it is better to lose the government than to win it from populism,” Feijóo proclaimed hours after swallowing the toad of the first executive shared with the extreme right in Spanish democratic history. But today, the accounts do not give to reach Moncloa alone. And it remains to be seen if the new president of the PP will be able to galvanize the electorate in his favor in the two directions that he has made explicit in the rallies of his internal campaign: recover the voters who have made the party lose its status as the standard bearer of the social majorities -part of them have gone to Vox, but not all-; and attract the classic socialists, of order, who would have distanced themselves from the “Sanchista Party”. Anchoring himself in the center -or in Christian democracy and temperate liberalism- and from there expanding to the right and left constitutes a major challenge for a Feijóo who, however, seems to have found the formula in Galicia according to his chain of majorities absolute. But for now, there is the question of whether he will release his brand-new mandate photographing himself at the investiture of Mañueco side by side with Vox and his contempt for “the cowardly right-hander.”

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