Castile and León whispers in Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s ear. Like a Jepet Grill who, with every move that the leader of the PP considers making together with Vox, reminds him of the uncomfortable lessons it can bring.
In March 2022, with Pablo Casado evicted from Génova, Feijóo tried to block the coalition agreement that the popular and ultra-nationalists were about to sign in Castile and Leon. The former president of the Xunta attributed the pact of the two right-wing parties to the inheritance received to try, in this way, to arrive with an unscathed record of services at the national congress of the PP in Seville, from which he would be elected president. But he didn’t succeed.
Those of Santiago Abascal extended the post-electoral calendar to the maximum so that the match between the president of the Board, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco (PP), and the vice-president, Juan García-Gallardo (Vox), would take place after the popular convention, to force the already appointed leader of the opposition to choose between going to the inauguration or refusing the invitation. Feijóo’s obvious discomfort pushed him to avoid the photo claiming that he was focused on a tour that took him all over Spain to publicize his road map at the head of the PP, as it happened. But, since then, the journal of sessions of the Courts of Castile and Leon has not stopped accumulating uncomfortable episodes of populism present in the regional Government in the form of a coalition partner.
In the first plenum held in the Courts of Valladolid after the pact between the two right-wing parties was sealed, García-Gallardo accused the left of “inviting mothers to crush disabled children in their wombs”. As if the statement, in itself, was not uncomfortable enough for a PP in which the abortion debate has never had a consensus, he addressed Noelia Frutos, a socialist prosecutor with a disability, and told her that I would talk to him “as if he were any person”.
Despite the indignation generated, the vice-president without portfolio of Vox did not want to withdraw his words and, in view of the dimension that the controversy acquired, it had to be Mañueco who showed his face and asked for a lukewarm apology in adjournment.
For the second plenary session, Vox let slip that the renewed Government of Castilla y León does not recognize gender-based violence and, in addition, admitted that it does not have major initiatives against depopulation – especially in the rural areas where the ministry claimed – beyond blaming the “hypersexualization of society that trivializes sex”.
For the third, Vox had already shown off its climate denialism, despite the devastating wave of forest fires that last summer ravaged many hectares of Spain’s largest community.
And for the fourth, García-Gallardo had already called the Ciutadans attorney, Francisco Igea, “moron”, after he cornered him for the irregular use of public media.
With parliamentary decorum in disrepair, the initiative came that women who decided to have an abortion should first listen to the fetal heartbeat, which despite the discomfort of a good part of the regional barons of the PP, forced Feijóo to take a step forward to promise that “no woman would be coerced”. And more recently, the failure to comply with the European Union’s health measures against bovine tuberculosis due to Vox’s scientific denialism, which despises health controls.
Despite the tension that has been reached, the leadership of the PP has not foreseen the breakup of the coalition. In Génova 13 they choose to keep the periodic fights that their partner poses and allege that it will be Vox, and not the popular ones, that will notice this wear and tear in the long run. But no one dares to predict whether, when the investiture of the next president of the Spanish Government is resolved, an electoral advance will be decreed that will put an end to the obvious discomfort that Vox is causing for the PP in Castilla y León.
