First (visible) fire in Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s PP. The designation of the party’s candidate in La Rioja for the next regional elections has caused the planting of a good part of the affiliates and positions in the region, and has taken ahead the former president of both the community and the PP, José Ignacio Ashtrays. A group of militants demonstrated on Thursday before the Regional Committee that appointed former councilor Gonzalo Capellán, whom they pointed out as an anti-democratic imposition by the national leadership. The bases demand an internal congress, pending since 2021, to elect the leader and head of the cartel.
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La Rioja was one of the communities where the PP had not confirmed its candidate when there are only seven months left for the elections. The region was governed uninterruptedly by the right from 1995 until, in 2019, the PSOE won the elections and snatched the Executive from it.
The mandate of the president of the party, José Ignacio Ceniceros, ended in 2021, but almost two years later the relevant congress has not been held. A clear breach of the PP statutes that was not corrected by Pablo Casado’s leadership, but neither by Feijóo’s. The Galician leader, who has recently appealed to the “unity” of the conservative formation in internal acts, has not given the militants a voice and has sent his right-hand man at the organizational level, Deputy Secretary Miguel Tellado, to close a candidacy. The chosen one is the one who was the Minister of Education with the historic Pedro Sanz.
The election provoked public complaints by those who see in Gonzalo Capellán a kind of outsider who returns to the PP after leaving it six years ago and moving to the private sector. But, finally, from Genoa the regional leaders of La Rioja have been tied short and the Regional Executive Committee voted on Thursday night, unanimously, the election of Chaplain as a candidate. The Electoral Committee piloted by Diego Calvo from A Coruña must now ratify him in the position.
But a good number of militants of the PP of La Rioja have not felt represented by the decision of the fifty positions that make up the Regional Executive Committee. Its spokesman is Óscar Reina, who in a conversation with elDiario.es assures that since last March they have collected the signatures of 700 militants (out of a total of 2,500) to promote the congress that, finally, has not taken place.
Reina resigns herself to the fact that Capellán, against whom she says she has “nothing”, is the PP candidate in the May 2023 elections. And she denounces that some positions in the Regional Committee received calls “from Madrid” to support the selected person by the national leadership. “Others did it out of personal interest,” she laments.
“We do not analyze the movements or seek to support a candidate,” says Reina about the reasons why the natural holding of the regional congress has been prevented. “We fight for the rights of members,” she insists. But these have been violated and the consequence is that the illegitimacy of Gonzalo Capellán’s election as a candidate has been “whitewashed.”
“We have fought as hard as we could,” the platform spokesman points out in a telephone conversation, who concedes that “at this point” no one has taken them “into account”, neither in the regional nor in the national direction. “And here we come. Although the national and regional leadership have bullied us, we have tried to get a vote”.
Ashtrays wrapped Casado… and Feijóo
The decision of the Regional Committee, despite the presence of mayors and militants at the door to protest the procedure, was thus aligned with the wishes of the national leadership. And he took ahead the president of the party, and former president of La Rioja, José Ignacio Ceniceros.
Ceniceros replaced Pedro Sanz at the head of the regional organization in 2015. That year he revalidated the Government of the community, but did not repeat the victory four years later, in the midst of the electoral debacle suffered by the PP in the 2019 elections.
But Pablo Casado kept him at the head of the organization. Not in vain, in the national congress a year before he raised him to the presidency of the PP Ceniceros gave him his support against Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría. Casado also had Cuca Gamarra, from La Rioja, for the national leadership, who ended up being the parliamentary spokesperson when the leader unseated Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo.
Gamarra, former mayor of Logroño, made the leap to national politics and has shown no interest in returning to La Rioja. Feijóo raised her to the General Secretariat of the PP when she replaced Casado at the head of the party and her national relevance is greater than ever.
Feijóo also received the support of Ceniceros at that night meeting in February 2022 in which the PP regional barons forced their president to resign and proclaimed Feijóo sole heir. The Madrid leader saw this as a conspiracy against him, an idea that some of the few people who maintain some contact with him say he has not yet discarded.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo formally assumed the leadership of the PP in April. But half a year later, and seven months before the elections, he has not finished finalizing the candidacies in a large part of the regions where elections are held next May. Almost a third of the communities called to the polls in 2023 are waiting for their headliner in elections that will mark the future of the party’s national leader and will serve to measure the strength with which he faces the general elections scheduled for the end of the year .
Feijóo’s management has forced the replacement in La Rioja, has resorted to the septuagenarian Juan José Vivas to repeat as a candidate in Ceuta at the risk of losing the place, has pushed the leader in Asturias, Teresa Mallada, to resign from leading the ballots without announcing an alternative, and he must still decide what he wants, and to whom, in Aragon and Navarra, where a break with the UPN provincial right is very likely. It is not a small task. In the PP they are very aware of the importance of the May elections. And the clock ticks.
