Saturday, April 2. Alberto Núñez Feijóo has been acclaimed as the new president of the PP in the extraordinary congress in Seville after a coup by the regional barons, himself included, which has liquidated the mandate of Pablo Casado. Before hundreds of delegates, the Galician leader promises “another party” with a “new agenda and attitudes”. “There is a hunger for change. I ask that when you return home, tell your neighbors that this change has already begun”, he assured an audience that believed that the internal nightmare that the confrontation between the national leadership and Isabel Díaz Ayuso had turned into had ended.
Feijóo raised his mandate as something opposed to that of Casado. He promised to “remove politics from confrontation, from hyperbole”, “demonstrate responsibility and calm”, not to be “anxious to reach the goal in any way”. “We are in the Constitution, in the general interest, in the sense of the State. We will not move,” he said.
Seven months later, Feijóo has finalized the profile with which he himself applied to his party colleagues to revive it. The differences with Pablo Casado are diluted after certifying with the breakdown of the negotiations to unblock the Judiciary that he is not capable of reaching relevant agreements with the coalition government beyond a specific parliamentary vote.
Feijóo and his leadership have thus assumed the positions of the most extreme wing of the Spanish political and media right. Pedro Sánchez is not a legitimate president because he came to power with a kind of deceit to each other. He “Mortgage” to the Spaniards to stay in the Government. “Give in to the blackmail” of his parliamentary allies, thanks to whom such material measures have been approved (of those that matter to the citizen in his day to day and which are spoken of “in the bar”, in the words of Cuca Gamarra ) such as the ERTE, the labor reform, the minimum income, the discount on fuel or the VAT reduction on electricity and gas.
Last Monday, his number three, Elías Bendodo, appeared before the media at the party’s national headquarters. Little more than 72 hours had passed since the PP considered the negotiations for the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary as broken. “President Sánchez is a bad Spaniard and he is a bad socialist,” he said. And he repeated: “President Sánchez is a bad Spaniard and he is a bad socialist. There’s no more”.
Some words that are not so far from those of Pablo Casado in which he referred to Sánchez as a “felon”, that is, a “traitor”. It was 2019 and the PSOE was still governing alone. In fact, the elections for April of that year had not yet been called, nor had the photo of Colón been produced that united all the Spanish right-wing parties, including Vox, in an act that served as the launch of the 28A campaign that the leader won. socialist and sank the PP to 66 seats. In September of that year, before the electoral repetition, Casado had time to make an act of contrition and recognize: “Perhaps we had attitudes that were not the most correct.”
It didn’t last long. The “illegitimate president” was already part of the usual portfolio of disqualifications from the leader of the PP to the president of the Government. But Casado took him to Congress, to the 2020 investiture debate. And with him, Santiago Abascal. The alignment of the speeches of both during the first months of the pandemic was total, until Casado discovered with the ultras’ motion of censure that Abascal’s bow was first aimed at the building at number 13 on Calle de Génova in Madrid, in whose On the seventh floor is the office of the president of the party.
Feijóo tried to give a different image during his first months in office, with a double discourse that tried to protect the leader while it was others who distributed tow to the Government. The PP kept saying no to everything, but with better words. Until the fiasco of the CGPJ has arrived.
To justify the breakdown of the talks, the PP has recovered its most extreme speech. In the last control session of the Government, the parliamentary spokesperson, Cuca Gamarra, blurted out: “Whenever you have had the opportunity to choose, you have opted for populism, radicalism and independence for the general interest, the sense of State and the moderation”. “Mr. Feijóo has a word, political principles and conscience. You don’t, and that’s the difference, ”she sentenced.
Feijóo has yielded to the pressure of the hard wing of the right, the same one that sentenced Casado and led to the landing of the Galician in Madrid since, in his opinion, the previous leader was on his way to losing again against Pedro Sánchez. And he has done it when the polls have begun to reflect a erosion of his presidential image while the PSOE recovers ground. At the same time, the extreme right does not recover the vote that escaped the PP, which makes it more difficult for an alternative majority to be produced in 2023 to that of the current coalition government.
Casado had in 2018 and in 2021 almost closed an agreement with the Government to renew the CGPJ. On both occasions it was the PP who threw them out. The reaction of the right was to go on the attack and raise criticism against the Executive to try to cover up their own mistake, whether it was opening the negotiations or breaking them off at the last minute.
It is the same thing that has happened now. Feijóo has dusted off the manual of his predecessor to plug the criticism for what happened last week. Not in vain, some of those who shared the address with Casado and had a lot of media presence are still in their position, such as Gamarra or the spokesman in the Senate, Javier Maroto.
Feijóo broke off negotiations just before All Saints’ Day. After the four-day bridge, he has embarked on a long trip through Latin America that he had already planned and from which he will not return until mid-November. But before putting land in the middle, the leader of the PP demonstrated his alignment with the extreme right in another matter: the exhumation of the coup leader general Álvaro Queipo de Llano, on which he did not want to comment. To avoid speaking out, he hid behind the economy, although he maintains his commitment to repeal the Democratic Memory Law. Nothing new in the party that opposed the first memory law, which paralyzed the financing of the search for the mass graves of the Franco regime and which never has words of remembrance for the victims of the dictatorship.
“It will be this PP and another PSOE,” Feijóo said a week ago, assuring that when Pedro Sánchez loses the elections, he will recover the dialogue with his great rival. The answer came a few days later, through the mouth of the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños. “Third time’s the charm,” he told her, referring to the next leader of the right. But Feijóo already left a clue in his April speech before the Seville congress and he will not go against the active forces of his party because he knows what can happen to him. “If they don’t support you at home, you can hardly prove it abroad,” he said when taking the baton of the PP. It does not seem strange that some of those who were expelled from Genoa before their time wonder if Casado was fired “for this”.
