MADRID – Alberto Núñez Feijóo, this time, has seen his reputation as a perennially successful politician denied. Before the big leap to national politics just a year ago, he had governed Galicia for 13 years: four elections, four absolute majorities. The assault on Moncloa was expected to be more complex, and so it was against all odds, despite Feijóo using all the weapons available, the legal ones and even the slightly dubious ones. Because the president of the Popular Party has conducted an electoral campaign against Pedro Sánchez based entirely on low blows, half-truths and big lies.
To cast shadows on his strategy, his bogus data on the economy or the insinuations on the behavior of the socialist prime minister have been dutifully untrue by the press and contested by the interested party himself.
The sole objective was “to derogate from Sanchismo”, according to the formula repeated obsessively, in the squares and on the television “plató”. In this way, he contradicted his established reputation as a “moderate” politician (as a young man he voted for Felipe González, then socialist premier, because Manuel Fraga, Franco’s ex-minister of whom he himself became deputy in Galicia leadership, seemed to him “too right-wing”) and took an aggressive stance.
But Sánchez proved to be more alive than ever. In this change of strategy, he was prompted by an unscrupulous character that Spain has known for decades: the journalist Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, who was spokesman for the first Aznar government and is now the chief of cabinet of Ayuso, president of the Community of Madrid and figure of populist leader to whose construction he contributed in a decisive way.
Had he gathered sufficient support to form an absolute majority, the PP leader would still have found himself having to manage a very complicated situation in order to build a collaborative relationship with the Vox ultras. He himself admitted that «a coalition government with Vox is not the best choice for Spain» (after having fired at zero against the “alliances”, which never existed, of the PSOE with the Basque and Catalan separatists of EH Bildu and Erc: two parties that approved single legislative initiatives of the government but abstained on the investiture of Sánchez).
Feijóo claims that he shares almost nothing with the electoral program of Santiago Abascal’s party: from positions on macho violence to climate change denial to the hyper-centralist line on the territorial organization of the state. Instead, he agrees with the commitment to curb independence, but the hasty methods prefigured by Abascal seem incompatible with the rules of a democratic state. The same leader of Vox, moreover, has not spared poisonous barbs at the president of the PP, accused at least of being unreliable.
Difficult to understand how much there was tactics and how much real convictions in the statements of the two potential allies. The only certain fact is that, after the administrative elections of May 28, in the regions and cities where Vox’s votes were needed to create a majority, the PP welcomed them, accepting the presence of the ultras party in the councils. And starting to question their own programs and principles to facilitate the agreement with post-Franco training. A 180-degree turn for the “moderate and centrist” politician who criticized his predecessor Casado for getting too close to Vox. Feijóo recalled that when, in 2009, he became deputy in the Xunta of Galicia, his father warned him: “Remember that the higher you climb, the more painful the fall will be.” Now he thought he had reached the top, but the reality of Spanish politics has frozen his expectations of him.