The PP caravan for the European elections will start on Thursday in Catalonia with Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Dolors Montserrat, number one on the list, but without the usual blue color that characterizes its symbols. The blue has been replaced by an image of a mobilization in the street, with Spanish flags in the background, because it is the citizens who are wanted to appeal to speak out about Pedro Sánchez. The PP invites the Spanish people to make 9-J a plebiscite on the president. “Your vote is the answer,” says the motto.
The response to his policies but above all to the formula with which he arrived at Moncloa after 23-J, “surrendering for seven pro-independence votes,” was explained yesterday. And also an appeal to voters to use his ballot as a response to the letter that Sánchez addressed to the citizens, opening a period of reflection on his continuity in Moncloa. The PP wants the results of the European elections – if it wins – to be interpreted as a voice of rejection of Sánchez.
All of this in a context in which 9-J will be the last elections before the general elections in which all citizens can vote. “Now or never” is the second campaign slogan, which insists on this invitation to express an opinion about the socialist leader that can be read as a verdict.
Carmen Fúnez, deputy secretary of organization, and Esteban González Pons, presented the campaign axes on Friday. In argumentative terms they want to ask citizens if they want a country where whoever wins the elections does not govern, a place where “everything is granted” to the independentists, the enemies of Spain. A way of doing politics with which the Executive surrenders “by seven votes” and a government with a “climate of corruption that stinks.”
In these campaign axes that were broken down, reference is made to Pedro Sánchez’s pact with Junts and ERC, but the explicitly mentioned amnesty does not appear. González Pons pointed out, when asked about it, that this issue is part of the campaign “to the extent that the amnesty will be definitively approved in Congress during the campaign.” The amnesty will be there, he continued, “but above all the shame of a President of the Government who, having lost the elections, sold everyone’s freedom in exchange for the seven votes he was missing.”
The entire focus of the PP’s approach in this campaign thus pivots on confronting Pedro Sánchez. The leaders of the PP indicated that they are looking for a transversal voter, with the common denominator of wanting to transfer the socialist leader to “leave.” In Spain, González Pons pointed out, there are people on the left, center and right who are not comfortable with the Government of Spain being decided by the independentists.
Feijóo thus proposes a contest in which “he comes out to win” and that will serve to measure the forces of the popular after 23-J. The party is at risk, but also the president of the party who will throw himself into the campaign with a caravan that will run parallel to Dolors Montserrat’s. In 2019, the socialists won 20 seats and the PP 12, and the objective is to achieve an explicit victory. Although the popular candidacy can absorb a good part of the Ciudadanos electorate, the resistance demonstrated by Vox in the Basque and Catalan elections makes it difficult for Feijóo to obtain a large majority – if he achieves one.
The image that accompanies the campaign slogan conveys the idea of ??mobilization, and the PP has designed a strategy to try to achieve it. It will be a municipal campaign, worked from below and close to the street to seek maximum involvement of the party, as Fúnez explained. This search for mobilization will have as its epicenter the concentration called on Sunday, May 26 in Madrid, which with the slogan “Spain responds,” was proposed after Sánchez ended his period of reflection determined to continue under the banner of a “democratic regeneration.” .
Such a mobilization against everything that Sanchismo means for the PP, with express reference also to the amnesty, which is intended to be the central event of the campaign at the Puerta de Alcalá in the Spanish capital.
