Expectations are very high for the PP. Alberto Núñez Feijóo and his team have set the bar very high, to have more votes than the left, to make it impossible for them to form a government, and thus force a negotiation with one of the parties that have supported Pedro Sánchez. All so as not to have to form a coalition government with Vox, which is the last of the options envisaged by the president of the PP.
This stigma, that of having been pointed out by the PSOE, Sumar, and other parties similar to Pedro Sánchez, as a copy of Vox, and more so after the agreements in Valencia and Extremadura, is what the popular leader has had to defend the most in this campaign, together with the recurring photo with the drug trafficker Marcial Dorado and the alleged lies that the president of the Spanish Government awarded him in the face-to-face.
But nothing has had a reflection, according to sources from the PP leadership, in the expectations of the popular leader. The turning point, in favor of Feijóo, the same sources say, was the face-to-face that was held on the fourth day of the campaign, and after that, nothing has been able to reverse the upward trend, neither the three-way debate, nor the interview with TVE in which he gave an erroneous data that he had to correct, nor his back pain that prevented him from traveling to the Canary Islands.
According to the PP, the face-to-face was “the moment when Spain discovered the power of our candidate”, and since that day “the support of the street has multiplied”. As an example, just yesterday Núñez Feijóo was applauded on a plane when the passenger warned of his presence. This leads the PP to conclude that “Sánchez will not only lose because he did it wrong, but because Spain already knows that Feijóo is better”.
But with this scenario and these expectations, the leader of the PP has only one way out, to get the incontestable result that will make him win and govern, and, moreover, that will allow him to try to govern without Vox. What is this result? In the direction of the PP, they place it around 150 deputies, quite a challenge for Feijóo. If he wins with 148 deputies, 60 more than he got in 2019, it could be interpreted as a failure, and the possibility of governing alone, or even governing, could slip away.
The PP are convinced that this will not happen, that the result will be wider. Núñez Feijóo’s goal is to get more votes not only than the left, but the left plus EH BIldu and ERC. That the formation of an alternative government to his is not possible, even if the sum of his deputies and those of Vox does not reach an absolute majority. Then he will try to force a negotiation with other parties, such as the PNB, that can facilitate his investiture, just so that the government with Vox is not necessary. Those of Abascal, they say, could not explain not facilitating the change and for Sánchez to continue as president.
Faced with this perspective, the president of the PP shapes his speech, and when he spoke of repealing Sanchism, an expression he maintains, he introduces nuances. It is, he said at the rally he held yesterday in Malaga, before closing the campaign in A Coruña, about “repealing what has been done badly, reforming what can be improved and leaving as it is what has been done well, which is also there”.
They are conciliatory messages because “it’s not about revenge” against the Sánchez Government, “we don’t want to take revenge on anyone, we want to govern for everyone”, which means, he explained, having enough of a majority to form a government “without blackmail or ties”, with reference to Vox.
It is a message addressed to the more moderate part of the electoral spectrum and to ex-voters of the PSOE who doubt whether to vote for Núñez Feijóo, for fear of Abascal, after the Vox leader’s campaign was always confrontational. Faced with the ultra party, the leader of the PP responds with a moderate message: “I offer a cordial, calm and sensible change”, he said at the end of the campaign, and called for a useful vote to govern “without blackmail or ties, free, and not having more interest than the people’s”. A government focused on what is important,” he said.
Feijóo wants to capture, for this useful vote, voters from the left and the right, but at the end of the campaign he put more emphasis on socialist voters, specifically on “disenchanted socialists”. The Andalusian president, Juanma Moreno, offered them another reason to do so, “to recover their party by voting for Alberto Núñez Feijóo, because the PSOE needs to be in the opposition to regenerate”.
