Until fifteen years, at least. This is how the dismissed senior officials of the PSOE and BNG coalition said goodbye to their offices in the San Caetano administrative complex in 2009 with greater historical lucidity. He was no longer of his time to go away listening to Carlos Gardel, Argentine and therefore so Galician, singing his Volver, the one about “20 years is nothing.” This is practically how long the journey in the desert of the center-left will last, at least, after the 19 consecutive years in power that the PP has secured through the triumph of Alfonso Rueda and Alberto Núñez Feijóo. They have broken the ceiling of the fifteen and a half years that the fraguismo lasted, thanks to their skill in using the levers of power, the Galician disaster of the Government of Pedro Sánchez and the Ferrolana Yolanda Díaz and the global disaster of the opposition, which has not been able to compensate for the dazzling rise of Ana Pontón, right at the end of those announced at least three popular decades.
The nationalist leader yesterday qualified as a candidate to one day preside over the Xunta. It is a potentiality wrapped in all the uncertainties, but it is a position in which no nationalist had been placed since patriarch Daniel Castelao briefly held it in 1936.
As her biographer Suso de Toro defines her, Ana Pontón is the “total candidate”, emerging from the municipality of Sarria, in the heart of popular Galicia. It has led an anti-system liberation front, founded in 1982 outside the system of the 1978 Constitution, to overcome the barrier of 30% of the votes, a threshold that until yesterday only the three major Spanish parties, the UCD, had surpassed. created by Adolfo Suárez, the popular member of Fraga, also from Lugo, and the PSOE founded almost a century and a half ago by Pablo Iglesias Posse from Ferrol. Its success is based on the fact that, although it was a mirage, it generated the expectation that alternation was possible for the first time since 2009. It was when the PP recovered from what it experienced as an eviction in 2005 – its departure from the Xunta – in which, as Feijóo repeated in the opposition, “our teeth came out.”
Nobody bites in Galician politics like the PPdeG. Yesterday he demonstrated it again, by compensating for the lack of charisma of a Rueda who in these two years failed to convey that he felt like the authentic president and the deterioration of Feijóo’s image in Galicia since his departure to Madrid. With the skill of a great opportunist, he took advantage of the political cost of the investiture of Pedro Sánchez, in alliance with Díaz, in exchange for the amnesty. That’s why yesterday’s elections were called.
Sánchez takes his second great Galician cake. From that of 2016, precisely, his legend of resistance was born, because he took it ahead of him, which does not indicate that he will pass right now, even if it represents the beginning of the ordeal of the Europeans. The one left on the ropes is Díaz, while the success of Gonzalo Pérez Jácome’s Orense cantonalism announces afternoons of glory for his permanent show, now with a loudspeaker in Santiago.