The PP released yesterday an argument that will be key in its Galician campaign, in which Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s future is partly at stake.
If the party, which has governed Galicia with an absolute majority for the last thirteen years, fails to revalidate it on February 18, the next Galician executive will be “a branch” of Pedro Sánchez’s alliance with the Basque and Catalan independence activists. The Galician Nationalist Bloc, the second political force in this campaign, has a candidate, Ana Pontón, who could be the new president of Galicia if Alfonso Rueda, the current president of the Xunta, falls short of the 38 seats, and it is according to Rueda and Feijóo, a branch party of EH Bildu and ERC.
This was the message that the president of the PP and that of the Xunta repeated yesterday and that they will chant in unison in the bullring of Pontevedra, where on Saturday they expect to gather 14,000 people in the first big meeting of this campaign, in which Rueda and Feijóo will share some events.
The PP warns that Galicia can enter a drift like that of Catalonia “since the process and the pro-independence people govern” and that “the Government of Spain has assumed” from the moment it needed the votes of the pro-independence people to be in the power A political model, warned the president of the PP, that “holds back progress, due to social division”.
The Galician elections are something more than regional votes. Feijóo’s career began in Galicia and he is aware that the results will be interpreted in a national key. If Alfonso Rueda, his heir, loses the absolute majority, that loss will be attributed to him.
Feijóo knows that the mission is not easy. “We only need an absolute majority,” Rueda himself emphasized yesterday at the party’s national board of directors held in Madrid. “We depend on ourselves”, he said.
Feijóo and Rueda participated yesterday in Madrid – Rueda said it was his last trip to the Spanish capital before the start of the campaign on Thursday – first in a breakfast organized by the newspaper La Razón, and then in the meeting of the national executive board of the PP, in which the candidate for the Xunta also took the floor.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo emphasized that on February 18 “the Government of Galicia will be decided”, but also two ways of understanding the Government, and while some “allow a minority to impose its objective on a majority, in Galicia, the PP governs for the majority”.
But before the electoral campaign begins, Congress will approve the Amnesty law today, which will then have to pass to the Senate.
A law against which the PP again mobilized tens of thousands of people in an event in Madrid on Sunday. For all of them, Feijóo asked for respect and to stop insulting them by calling them “faces”.
The president of the PP was referring to the words of Sánchez in his Sunday interview with La Vanguardia, when he stated that “there is a faction that polarizes to demobilize and defeat the Spanish Government”. “To disqualify so many people in such a rude way, calling them ‘faces’, no president of the Spanish Government had ever done it,” said Feijóo.
In view of all this, Feijóo affirmed that “President Rueda and the PP are the answer that will be given by Galicians who do not agree with inequality and amnesty, and who want rulers who fulfill their commitment and their electoral program”.
“Those who do not want their country to take paths of division. And that they don’t want governments that focus on the ideological and personal interests of a small group of politicians”, he declared.
“Spain will not amnesty the PSOE”, concluded Feijóo, since despite the fact that the current Spanish Government “has a problem of amnesia, Spain will not forget it”. He will not forget, he said, that “Sánchez asked for a crime of rebellion to be applied to the pro-independence people and visited the injured policemen during the campaign, some of whom are now permanently disabled, but now they want to amnesty the radicals who provoked them those injuries”.
