What unites Alberto Núñez Feijóo with a flat-earther, a believer in The reptiliansan alleged comedian who despises women who choose to show their bodies, Santiago Abascal, Alvise Pérez, Llados or the general secretary of the UGT? Since Thursday, all of them have been interviewed by the WorldCast studio, a podcast presented by the businessman Pedro Buerbaum and with which the PP wants to make a qualitative leap in its communication strategy after the European elections of June 9 and the emergence of the ultra and anti-system candidacy for which Feijóo asked his management for explanations.
The PP leader has been interviewed by the streamer for his YouTube channel, which has almost a million subscribers. The pre-recorded programme will be available to watch this Thursday, as announced by Buerbaum himself on his social networks, where he has doubled the number of followers.
The PP has thus made a change in its communication strategy two years after Feijóo’s arrival in Madrid, and several bittersweet victories at the polls. Feijóo can boast of having won the two state-wide elections that have been held since he led the PP, but if after the 2023 general elections he was unable to govern, after the European elections in June this year the feeling is that the PSOE is holding on longer than expected, and that cohabitation with the parties on its right is hampering its options.
At the national headquarters on Calle de Génova in Madrid, they point out that it is “an obligation to be in all the spaces” that “allow” them to get closer to “potential voters.” “We will go to new formats to support the youth vote and the female vote,” the same sources assure. “Just like last year, we decided to go to spaces like ‘El Hormiguero’, which we had not gone to before,” they add.
Feijóo’s strategists have chosen Buerbaum because of the number of followers he has, according to sources consulted by elDiario.es, who also point to the presence of Pepe Álvarez in the podcast as an element that justifies Feijóo’s presence.
But Buerbaum’s channel is more aimed at the young male vote that catapulted the ultra Alvise Pérez to over 800,000 votes at the polls last June than at the female vote. Perhaps because the political gap between young people of different genders is wider than ever: women vote more to the left, while men look to the right and feed the ultra electorate.
Buerbaum, who made headlines by selling penis-shaped waffles, adopts in his interviews all the ideological and discursive frameworks of the ultra-right narrative, which fosters false ideas such as that you can occupy a house during a hospital appointment “and not be able to do anything”, that women enjoy excessive freedom that bothers men or that success consists of investing a little money and getting rich almost overnight.
Some of the most bizarre characters who represent this profile have appeared on his channel. For example, Amadeo Llados, a pseudo-guru who charges huge amounts of money for physical, emotional and financial coaching to frustrated kids who he promises will make millionaires, but who discover too late the reality behind the burpees and the fluorescent cars. Or Wall Street Wolverine, one of the streamers who established his residence in Andorra to avoid paying taxes in his country and who reached the height of fame with a video in which he desperately asked people, between screams and insults, not to sell their bitcoins during the penultimate crash of the virtual currency.
In the WorldCast archive (whose logo replaces the ‘s’ with the dollar symbol) you can find interviews with Daniel Estévez, the owner of the company Desokupa, who encourage conspiracy theories such as that the UN’s Agenda 2030 seeks the “replacement” of white European people or those who make a career and fortune by mocking trans people.
The PP says that they are not worried about the content of the channel Feijóo has visited. “We don’t only go to spaces that share our ideology,” they say from Calle Génova. “We are not worried about what the interviewer says, but rather what the interviewee answers,” they add. And they conclude that “the interview was conducted in an exquisite tone.”
In the European elections of June 9, the PP saw Vox hold on longer than expected, and the emergence of Se acaba la fiesta, which truncated one of the main strategic lines of the PP in the last decade. Both Feijóo and before him Pablo Casado defined the grouping of the right in an electoral brand as a necessity, which in the past allowed the PP wide quotas of power with electoral results not so far from its rivals. The provincial distribution of deputies benefits the big parties, especially the right that has historically concentrated the vote in a single list.
But the emergence of what was dubbed the “trifachito” (PP, Ciudadanos and Vox) divided the vote and was, in part, what allowed the progressive electoral victories of 2019 and the subsequent coalition government. Albert Rivera’s fiasco led Ciudadanos to a great crisis and its almost definitive disappearance, but Santiago Abascal’s party has shown that it has a firm electoral base.
At a time when the PP was content to co-govern with Vox at the municipal and regional level, despite the burden this represents at the national level, Alvise’s rise revives the hypothesis that three options will emerge on the right of the Spanish political scene, which could limit the number of seats to be distributed.
At a press conference held on Wednesday, the secretary general of the PP, Cuca Gamarra, said that “there is a very different communication, which is carried out through new elements and new actors. And that is what the interview that took place yesterday, for which an invitation was received and which was accepted, is about.”
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