Two days before the April 2019 elections, Pablo Casado showed that he was not up to the task. Not because of his stature, but because his recklessness or lack of experience pushed him to do something that harmed the interests of his party. A few years later, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, with much more political militia on his shoulders and a great ability to be boring when it is not convenient for him to give a headline, has committed a similar blunder. One of those of which it is not possible to know the true gravity of him until the day the polls open.
In 2019, Casado was theoretically interested in not creating incentives for Popular Party voters to decide to make the leap to Vox. For example, he had to affirm that a vote for Vox made it easier for Pedro Sánchez to continue in Moncloa. It is what he did during the campaign. But in an interview on the Friday before the elections, the president of the PP threw all that previous work into the trash.
“Vox or Ciudadanos, whether they have ten seats or have 40, they are going to have the influence they want to have to enter the Government or to decide the investiture or the legislature,” he said. The PP voter who was doubting whether to hand over his ballot to the far-right party saw his doubts cleared up. Casado’s phrase set the track free for him to do what he wanted. After all, they would all be together in the end.
Feijóo has taken care not to incur the same clumsiness. He insists on demanding a solo government – asking is free – and aspires to repeat what Moreno and Ayuso achieved in Andalusia and Madrid. But there are times when anything can happen to him if he has a microphone in front of him. To explain why it is not the same to accept Vox in a coalition government in the Valencian Community, as has happened, and to do the same in Extremadura, he commented this week that in the first case Santiago Abascal’s party had reached 12 % and in the second it only reached 8%.
So Vox voters already know. If they really want their formation to be in a coalition government after 23J, they must get it to reach 12%. Word of Feijóo. They don’t have it that hard. Vox pulled 15% in the November 2019 elections. Several polls now place it around that 12% threshold.
Numbers have a force that sometimes surpasses words. The PP can now cry all it wants with its call for a monocolor government, despite the fact that no poll anticipates its absolute majority. If he needs Vox’s support in an investiture, Abascal will be able to remind him of the 12% rule. It does not appear in the Constitution or in the laws. It is the PP president’s own harvest.
Not even a month has passed since its victory in the regional and local elections and the PP has discovered that digesting victory can become as uncomfortable as defeat. In Valencia, Carlos Mazón strove to reach a quick agreement with Vox, even though the package included an extorero nostalgic for Francoism. In the Balearic Islands, there was a first pact for the constitution of the Parliament that gave Vox the presidency. In this case, the bill came in the form of a xenophobic and anti-vaxx obsessed with penises (generally speaking, not just his).
It is still unknown how Marga Prohens, candidate to preside over the region, believes that the absence of that protrusion conditions her and if she shares the opinion of the second authority in the community.
Extremadura arrived and the news this time was not the election of a specimen of the extreme right taken from Guillermo del Toro’s cabinet of curiosities. There it was the PP candidate, María Guardiola, who stood up to the demands of Vox. What surprised everyone is that he did not justify it for reasons of distribution of power based on the number of votes –all that of 8% or 12%–, but for a matter of principle: “I cannot let into the Government those who deny sexist violence, dehumanize immigrants or unfurl a canvas to throw the LGTBI flag into a trash can”. Indeed, all that Carlos Mazón had done in Valencia.
Suddenly, the operating model of Feijóo that received so much praise from the barons of the party and the right-wing press gets caught up in confusion. The Galician who gave his regional leaders the maximum autonomy possible as long as they handed over all the controls of national politics no longer seems like a paradigm of cunning far from the constant interference of the Casado era. At the decisive moment, the legs have started to shake.
Some of the same people who had complained of being intimidated by García Egea’s authoritarian style are now claiming that the party leader show some authority and impose a strategy that conditions all negotiations with Vox. They complain that Mazón gave Vox everything he wanted and now the extreme right is grown and will not accept less than what he got in Valencia.
They also criticize Guardiola for ruling out a pact with Vox so firmly, which exposes Mazón and those who will come later. For the moment, Genoa has told its leader from Extremadura keep your mouth shut and that he tries to rebuild his relationship with Vox.
In the right-wing press, the idea prevails that you have to agree with Vox, even if it is by covering your nose and with your head in a diving suit. But these columnists are not the ones who have to lock themselves in a room with the ultra leaders without being able to open the windows.
The week ends with the election of Marta Fernández, from Vox, as president of the Cortes de Aragón, which has become the latest example of the bestiary that the PP and Vox pacts are drawing. Fernández seems like the result that artificial intelligence would offer on the prototype of the leader of the far-right party. I hate trans people, xenophobia, religious fundamentalism, climate denial, anti-feminism… There is no example of fanaticism that does not appear on their credentials.
This is not exactly the business card that Feijóo expected to show off in the July elections. The political cost of having such toxic unavoidable partners – if they weren’t, there wouldn’t be so much controversy – has made the PP have to explain itself. Or try badly, as Feijóo said about the negotiations in Extremadura that “there is a significant divergence that separates us from the possibility, at least for now, of reaching an agreement.” Feijóo, always with the clarity in the message as a flag.
When the PP wanted to be talking only about Sánchez, at this time it is their turn to talk about themselves and their likely ally and they are not prepared for such an exercise in transparency. At least his leader isn’t.
