Feijóo ordered monitoring of Alvise’s activity on social networks after his appearance in the European elections

Alberto Núñez Feijóo met with the PP leadership and its regional leaders after the European elections last June, which his party won. His speech in public was, as usual, triumphalist, and he barely referred to his direct competitors for the right-wing electorate. But behind closed doors, the PP leader took out his mobile phone and told his audience that someone had obtained 800,000 votes with that instrument alone. He was referring to Alvise Pérez. The PP leader ordered his people to keep an eye on that. “We have to improve our networks,” he said. And so they have done.

According to sources from the party, elDiario.es has been able to find out that since June the party has been tracking Alvise Pérez’s activity on social media. The objective: to understand how a former advisor to the former leader of Ciudadanos, Toni Cantó, has become the sixth force in votes in a national election with the electoral group ‘The party is over’.

Thanks to a mix of hoaxes and extremist messages on a Telegram channel, and the promise of giving away his MEP salary, Salf managed to break into the European Parliament with three seats. He beat Podemos at the polls and was on the verge of beating Sumar. Alvise had half the votes of Vox, who is pointed out at the national headquarters of the PP on Calle de Génova in Madrid as the real loser of the emergence of the new party.

Following the June elections, the PP made an effort, both publicly and privately, to downplay the Alvise phenomenon. “Our objective with these voters, but also with those of the PSOE, Vox and other political parties, is to convince them that the option for change in Spain is the one represented by the PP,” said national spokesman Borja Sémper at a press conference on June 10.

Since the June elections, Salf has consolidated his position in the polls. The CIS gave him 1.5% in the general elections that same month. In July, Simple Lógica for elDiario.es raised his vote to 3.1%.

Hardening the message

“We understand that there are many millions of Spaniards who are fed up and tired,” he added, pointing to his right: “In any case, it is a part of the political spectrum that does not affect us. An electoral war between Vox and the party is over. We continue to grow in the centre.”

But a few weeks later, the PP surprised everyone by announcing that Feijóo would participate in WorldCast, a podcast by a businessman and influencer who is a denialist and who promotes ultra-liberal messages. Exactly the type of content that abounds in the channels that have sprung up around Alvise and his group.

The experiment did not go particularly well. Not badly. Feijóo was Feijóo and the PP, at least for the moment, has not insisted on this route to try to reach younger voters who are far removed from traditional forms of communication, among whom television continues to dominate as a generator of opinion.

What the PP has done is toughen its discourse, and a lot. The process began months ago. But since July it has become more urgent. Vox and Alvise have made the attack on migrants their banner, especially minors who arrive alone on the Spanish coast, and Feijóo’s party is not prepared to let a new three-way competition on the right leave them out of any option to govern, as already happened to Pablo Casado with Vox and Ciudadanos.

But where this change of direction has been most noticeable is on social media. The PP has a Telegram channel where it publishes videos of speeches by its leaders. But it also publishes some of its own productions that it usually posts on Twitter as well.

The latest of this type is from September 1st, and is presented under a slogan that does not hide its intentions: “You go to work tomorrow, Pedro Sánchez goes back to enjoying yourself. You pay.”

If in Genoa they thought that the dissolution of the party founded by Albert Rivera and Co-governance with Santiago Abascal would lead conservative voters back into the fold, but this does not seem to be happening, according to public opinion data. The PP will have to work hard to attract them. A discursive dichotomy that Casado has already faced, with very little success.