After a day that shook Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s expectations, the popular leader’s ticket returns to the starting square: the one he occupied on July 23. Now, almost a month later, the president of the PP says he has the same reasons, despite Thursday’s break with Vox over the presidency of the Congress Bureau, to try to aspire to the presidency of the Spanish Government, if the King he proposes, even if he doesn’t succeed.
The no of the Basque Nationalist Party (PNB), repeated so many times, and the opposition of Vox to the fact that the Basque nationalists enter the equation, make his investiture impossible. According to popular sources, Núñez Feijóo is aware of this, but he will try anyway. For this reason, on Tuesday in the consultation round he will tell Felipe VI that he has 171 or 172 votes, depending on what the Canarian Coalition (CC) does.
Vox’s confirmation, yesterday, that Feijóo continues to have his 33 votes to be elected president, despite the anger at having been excluded from the Table, means that the popular leader can present himself before the King as the candidate who, for the moment , has more supports, even if they are not enough. And if the King offers it, he will accept the challenge.
Sources from the PP emphasize that, contrary to the speech “that the socialists want to impose”, the constitutive session of the Congress “is not a blow to Feijóo”, but the opposite. Despite not having obtained the presidency of the Chamber, “it has been seen that the Canarian Coalition is prepared to vote with the PP, even knowing that we would lose”, so that Pedro Sánchez is closed to the Canarian way, which in some moment he had studied, so that his investiture only requires the abstention of Junts.
In other words, Feijóo is preparing to go to the appointment with the King and tell him that if he is appointed as a candidate, he is ready to present himself and defend his investiture, even if he does not have enough votes. It is, they say in the PP, that no one can blame Feijóo for what is known as the Arrimadas syndrome, that is to say, that no one can blame him “for not trying”. It will be, they assure the PP, the “visualization” that Feijóo has won the elections, even if he loses the investiture, but it will also be an opportunity to present a government program, which could also be the first electoral act, if the elections need to be repeated, underline
Therefore, yes, Feijóo will “attempt the investiture”. There is only one thing that would make him give it up, that Pedro Sánchez presents himself with a closed pact, initialed and confirmed by the signatories, which guarantees him that he has a majority to be president.
In this sense, it would be a similar situation, save the distances, to that of Extremadura, when the break between the PP and Vox made the socialist Fernández Vara aspire to be invested, despite not having the necessary support. When the popular and those of Santiago Abascal reached an agreement to invest María Guardiola, Vara resigned.
This position is mostly shared in the PP and among the barons, who assure that there are no dissensions about Feijóo’s leadership. These sources point out that the PSOE “would like” the popular leader to “surrender” and visualize that Sánchez is the only possible candidate.
What happened on Thursday was analyzed by Feijóo with a small group of PP leaders who met the same day in the afternoon. Contrary to the image that was given, the sources consulted assure that there was no lack of foresight. That it was a risk that had to be taken if you wanted to have any chance, and that’s what was done, despite the image of the rupture of the right. They say it was “foreseeable”. And despite the omens that Feijóo was left alone, yesterday Vox confirmed that everything remains the same.
It was the secretary general of the far-right party, Ignacio Garriga, who dispelled the doubts that Abascal did not want to clarify, in a clear way, on Thursday in Congress. Although he reproached the top of the populists for the gesture of “contempt and arrogance” that meant, in his opinion, not facilitating the votes for Vox to obtain a vice-presidency in the governing body of Congress, Garriga assured that they are still “willing” to put their 33 deputies at the service of the PP. “We are people of our word”, he emphasized, although he warned that “you cannot get votes in exchange for offences”.
The photograph of the divided voting right in the constitution of the Bureau remains, for the moment, in a disagreement. Party sources explain that his position remains unmovable. And this is to convince the ranks of the PP that the “reliable” and “indispensable” partner is Vox, “the only one who is willing to talk to them” to make a common front of the right from now on: either as opposition to the Government this legislature or in the face of new elections.
