Alberto Núñez Feijóo, president of the Popular Party, has stated that if he becomes president in July “we are going to open a new political stage”, in which he wants “Catalonia and the interests of the Catalans to be a priority”. The leader of the PP came to amend his party’s strategy with Catalonia in recent years and regretted that the Catalan conflict was assumed as “an issue that we could not address, chronic”. For Feijóo, this detachment is harmful because “if Catalonia does not It’s going well, Spain isn’t doing well, and vice versaâ€.
Before a packed and expectant auditorium at the XXXVIII Annual Meeting of the Cercle d’Economia, Feijóo defended that Catalan businessmen are more interested in talking about using public money well than adjusting the crime of embezzlement by the leaders of the procés; more of generating employment and legal certainty than of “continuing to be absorbed in the usual issues carried out by the same people as always”. Housing, public health, security, efficiency of the Administration… “I invite you to stop talking about the problems of politicians and to start talking about the problems of citizens”, he has influenced. The task is “titanic”, he has acknowledged, but he has been “excited”.
Feijóo has marked the reduction of public debt as a high priority if he becomes president in the next general elections. The popular leader has argued that the bulky liabilities harm the growth of competitiveness and financing will become increasingly expensive at a time of rising interest rates, with a bill of 40,000 million euros in 2024.
Feijóo has also focused on the need to recover pre-covid GDP levels, to reduce the unemployment rate and to recover purchasing power among families, for which he proposes to deflate personal income tax to cancel the impact of inflation on low and medium incomes .
For all these reasons, he said that “the economic situation is not one of triumphalism. We must forget conformism and start a reform policyâ€. One of the big points is legislative simplification, he said, to facilitate investment in Spain.
Feijóo spoke with the president of the entity, Jaume Guardiola, who put on the table the need to review the financing system and state investments in Catalonia, in which they have been “run aground for many years”, asking for urgency to address them. The person in charge of the Cercle also recalled the relative stagnation of recent years in economic terms and per capita income, both at the Catalan and national level, as denounced in his opinion note.
He also offered the Cercle as a source of collaboration and dialogue with a view to his possible arrival at the presidency of the Government, enhancing his “Galician accent of polyphonic Spain”.
After turning the electoral landscape upside down with the call for general elections on July 23, after the regional and municipal elections on the weekend boosted the PP and Vox at the polls, Feijóo’s was one of the most anticipated interventions of the journeys. The popular leader maintained his presence at the economic meeting while the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, canceled his attendance after 28-M. Sánchez will be replaced by Vice President Nadia Calviño, who will close the conference.
