Corrales del Vino is a town in Zamora with less than 1,000 inhabitants. What is known as the emptied Spain, or “the rural world” as Alberto Núñez Feijóo likes to say. The president of the PP visited this town this Saturday, on the way to Galicia, where tomorrow he will hold what will surely be the largest rally of the electoral campaign, and on the eve of the face-to-face debate that Sánchez and Feijóo will hold at Atresmedia.
The 23-J campaign is atypical, and the campaign of its leaders is also atypical. If on Friday, the popular leader was in Seville in the morning, in an act in a hotel, and in the afternoon in Badajoz, in another closed place, due to the temperatures. In Corrales del Vino (Zamora), what the president of the PP did was walk through the streets, talk to his neighbors, listen to them, and then spoke for barely fifteen hours, enough to say what he wanted.
And what Alberto Núñez Feijóo wanted was to contrast his closeness to the people, his proximity to the citizens, with the campaign of Pedro Sánchez, “from sets and locked up in La Moncloa”, while he stands at the gas stations where he passes and talks with the people, he has a coffee in a bar and talks with the parishioners, he goes to the towns and talks with the people.
That is what he wants: “That they know me, that they know who I am, what I am going to do and the commitments that I assume”, only then will he be able to achieve, he said, what he wants, to be president “through an agreement between all of us”. without intermediaries. A clear message to Vox, in his thoughts in all acts, even if he does not mention him by name. “I want a sufficient majority, without intermediaries.”
That is why he is going to tour Spain, he is doing it, as he did during the 28-M campaign, while the PSOE, stressed the president of the PP, what he does is “get away from the people, not be in the towns, not give the hand”. And the most, Pedro Sánchez “who has turned his back on people for five years and now he is surprised that people turn their backs on him.”
He stressed that while he is in Zamora today and tomorrow he will be in Pontevedra, Monday is the electoral debate, Sánchez has decided not to give any rally throughout the weekend. “He has shut himself in for four days to prepare a debate,” Feijóo joked, “and he wanted to have six face to face. If he needed four days to prepare each debate, he would need two electoral campaigns to celebrate them.”
It is not that Feijóo is not going to prepare it. in fact, the president of the PP has been preparing it all week. Studying the papers prepared by his team, asking for data. But he does it when traveling by car, by plane or by train. In fact, he will have no activity from Sunday at noon until Monday night, when the face-to-face will take place.
What happens, Feijóo explained, is that he knows what he is going to say, because he will bring to the debate “what I have heard from people, what they have told me, and the proposals that I have collected”. He will say in the debate that he has been told that the Spanish “are fed up with sanchismo”, that they want a president “who treats the peoples of all the autonomous communities equally, and not better those who belong to the minorities who decide”.
The president of the PP will go to the debate, he says, to tell Sánchez, “what is happening in the towns of Spain; the problems that people have to make ends meet; that they cannot buy what they used to buy, that they have the electricity has gone up, they can’t pay the mortgage, the majority of families have less disposable income and can’t make ends meet”. In other words, he stressed, “I will bring to the debate what happens in Spain and not on television sets”, referring to the tour of the Prime Minister doing interviews and the interviews he has with his ministers in Ferraz.
“I will bring to the debate that the Spanish are fed up with blocks and blockades, that they want a president of all, who is not subject to minorities and who faces difficult situations.” Feijóo imagines Sánchez all weekend looking for arguments to say “that he is not a liar”, while he will tell the Spaniards “that I will never lie to them”. He will fill the debate with proposals and compromises.
And since he was in a small town in the rural world, the president of the PP explained measures of his program that affect them, such as lowering taxes for companies that decide to settle in rural areas, because that way there will be work and people will not have to leave . And if this happens, there will be aid to rehabilitate the towns, because there will be those who live in the houses. Taxes to buy houses in emptied Spain will also be lower, and young people will be able to return, because there will be houses and jobs.
But while that happens, and aware that now the great problem of the towns is aging, the PP also proposes ideas to alleviate the loneliness of the elderly in the rural world, such as the creation of “homes for the elderly”, where there are caregivers , that allow the elderly to continue living in their homes, but with the attention in those homes that they need, and connected with them, without ruling out collective housing, so that the elderly do not have to leave their towns to go to a residence. Another measure, that there be a time frame in which the elderly have preference in their access to public services.
