The campaign for the regional elections in Galicia on February 18 has begun and essentially four candidates will compete for the votes and the 75 seats in the Galician Parliament, with different challenges for all of them.
In common, they have been born between 1967 and 1977 and with the exception of Ana Pontón (BNG), none of them had previously been a candidate to preside over the Xunta. The current president, Alfonso Rueda, inherited the position from Alberto Núñez Feijóo and has the mission of retaining it with a new absolute majority. Pontón will seek to avoid this with the help of José Ramón Gómez Besteiro (PSOE) and Marta Lois (Sumar), whose challenge is to enter the Chamber.
Alfonso Rueda (Pontevedra 1968) faces his first elections as head of the cartel, since he has always been Feijóo’s number two, in whose shadow he has been forged since in 2005 he asked him to be his general secretary in the Galician PP, in charge of preparing to the party for post-Fraguism, and above all to put an end to the provincial baronies in a Galicia too accustomed to provincial presidents setting the pace. In fact, Alfonso Rueda’s main decision as president of the Galician PP was to remove José Manuel Baltar from the presidency of the Ourense Provincial Council, which he had inherited from his father, José Luis Baltar. The president of the Xunta de Galicia, who has the mission of keeping the PP in power and adding a new absolute majority to the four successive ones that Feijóo achieved, was born in Pontevedra in 1968.
The membership of his father, José Antonio Rueda Crespo, to the Galician Coalition, where It did not last long and in 1993 he was already president of Nuevas Generaciones de Pontevedra, the youth branch of the PP. He was already studying law in Santiago de Compostela, he had already met his wife, Marta, and after working some occasional jobs, such as selling investment funds and doing military service, he followed the family’s advice and prepared the exams for secretary of the City Council, which allowed him to dedicate himself to politics, contravening his father’s recommendations.
During his stay in Nuevas Generaciones he caught the attention of the then general secretary of the PP, And it was the name that Palmou gave to Feijóo when, once at the head of the PP, he asked him for advice on who to appoint as the party’s number two to recover the Xunta, and he was the architect of the campaign that ended with the bipartite of PSdGa and BNG to end of 2005.
Since then and until the current president of the PP left the Xunta de Galicia, Alfonso Rueda has been his shadow, first as Minister of the Presidency, Public Administrations and Justice; then vice president, and finally his successor. Although few people knew him when he became president not two years ago after Feijóo left for Madrid, Rueda has dedicated himself to visiting every corner of Galicia and making himself known, and he achieves it, they say, with a beer and a skewer of tortilla in the middle, because he is close, frank, a good person, “a super normal guy,” say his daughters, Beatriz and Martes, 19 and 17 years old, in a video that the PP recently released. However, they do not spare him any criticism “he is very unpunctual,” they say. A long-distance runner, not only in politics, but in real life, since he continues training to run, a passion that he shares with the bicycle and the motorcycle, with which he gets lost when he wants to disconnect.
The political scientist Ana Belén Pontón (Chorente-Lugo, 1977) faces her great challenge. She is an atheist when it comes to polls, the leader and candidate of the Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG) trusts the street more than the polls. And, despite the fact that the PP is still ahead in almost all demographic studies, she perceives an “upward trend” in her candidacy to become the first female president of Galicia after 43 years of male presidents.
After assuming the reins of a party bled by successive splits in 2014, Pontón led the refoundation of the organization with the aim of expanding the social base. And in just six years, not exempt from turbulence due to the disputes – already put on hold – with Anova at the nationalist level, he led the BNG to its best historical result in regional elections until it positioned itself, with 19 deputies, as the second force in Galicia ahead of the PSOE.
Consolidated as head of the opposition, the leader of the Bloc has taken advantage of the legislature to prepare her assault on San Caetano – presidential headquarters – at the expense of a Galician PP which, after Núñez Feijóo’s move to national politics, she notes “more nervous never”. Hence her calls to concentrate the vote for change in the BNG for what she assures are the “most important elections in the 42 years of Galicia’s history.”
“Besteiro pulls, and pulls more and more,” they say in the leadership of the PSOE. The socialist candidate for the presidency of the Xunta de Galicia, the reborn José Ramón Gómez Besteiro (Lugo, 1967), takes on his new political challenge with two priorities: achieving a left-wing majority that manages to oust Alfonso Rueda after 14 years in office consecutive from the Popular Party, and with an absolute majority, in Galicia; and even being able to lead that political change and that left-wing majority ahead of Ana Pontón’s BNG, which already in 2020 managed to overtake the PSdeG as the first opposition party.
Besteiro is convinced that he can achieve both objectives at the polls on February 18. And in the leadership of the PSOE they are committed to achieving a left-wing majority that ousts Rueda from the presidency of the overtaking BNG will be very difficult. The fracture between Sumar and Podemos also complicates the left’s ability to maximize its votes in Galicia.
But Besteiro is going for it, in this second political life. In 2013 he won the leadership of a Galician socialism subscribed to internal confrontation for many years. But just three years later he resigned from office and renounced the electoral candidacy for the presidency of the Xunta, on his own initiative despite knowing he was innocent, after being accused by Judge Pilar de Lara of crimes that, seven years later, evaporated and They were archived without any trace of them being found. In 2023, this lawyer with a long career in the City Council of his hometown, and as president of the Lugo provincial council, returned to politics in a rehabilitation exercise promoted by Pedro Sánchez. First, as a delegate of the Government in Galicia, then as a deputy for Lugo in Congress – he was the first to intervene entirely in Galician in the chamber in the current multilingual legislature -, and now, also, as a socialist candidate for the presidency of the Xunta .
“Sometimes one has to leave his home to defend his country. Now it’s time to go back.” Marta Irene Lois González (Vigo, 1969) has undertaken a return trip to Galicia to lead the electoral list of Sumar to the presidency of the Xunta.
Linked in her beginnings to the Galician Tides, the doctor in Political Science and professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela has extensive political background. First as Equality Councilor for the Compostela city council and, more recently, as national spokesperson for Sumar whose parliamentary group was built from scratch after the last 23-J elections. A task for which, they say, it has been the voice and ears of Yolanda Díaz, her great supporter.
Lois now faces the challenge of overcoming the first electoral test of this confederal space after the general elections. The surveys, at the moment, are not with him. Although Sumar’s entry into the Galician parliament, which the most optimistic peg at two seats, could be decisive in causing the PP to be replaced at the head of the Xunta. A possibility that Lois will exploit in the campaign after seeing how his chances have been reduced.
