The president of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, took advantage of his visit to the Basque Country to bless the change within the Basque PP, delve into his desire to regionalize the party and, particularly, attack Pedro Sánchez’s possible pacts in the face of the investiture In the morning, at the national congress on Family Business held in Bilbao, chaired by the King, he criticized that “instead of talking about job creation and tax cuts, in Spain we talk about self-determination and amnesty”; In the afternoon, in Gernika, he criticized the “ignominy” of EH Bildu “deciding the future” of Spain.
At the discursive level, Feijóo’s statements in Bilbao and Gernika had the common thread of criticism of Sánchez, whom he presented as a politician capable of agreeing on any content in order to be invested. “It is undignified that politicians think more about themselves than about the citizens they serve. A politician, when he gives in to a condition that another politician sets, he is not generally serving the citizens,” he noted.
In Gernika, on the other hand, Feijóo channeled the censorship of Sánchez through criticism of EH Bildu. “What gesture has Bildu had with the victims of terrorism?” He declared. The presence of the popular leader in Gernika, however, had a deeper political reading in a Basque key. A few days before, on November 4, the PP seals the election of Javier de Andrés as Carlos Iturgaiz’s replacement at the head of the party in Euskadi, he wanted to publicly support this replacement, cooked up from Genoa. Furthermore, under the Gernika tree, a symbol of freedom and Basque self-government, he gave a speech that gives an idea of ??the parameters around which they want to move in the face of the spring Basque elections. Taking advantage of the 44th anniversary of the approval of the Statute of Gernika, Feijóo raised the banner of “autonomism”, vehemently defended this framework of self-government and even spoke of his “constitutional Galicianism”.
The Basque elections will foreseeably be the next electoral event on the horizon, and Genoa attaches importance to them. The Basque PP remains close to its electoral ground, although in the last two elections it has managed to stop the bleeding of votes and timidly take flight. Feijóo and De Andrés are working on building their own, autonomous discourse that can attract voters disenchanted with the PNV. It is the Basque version of the regionalization of the PP that its leader seeks, a commitment that he has talked about since arriving in Madrid and that, for the moment, has only been timidly shown in Euskadi.
