The Popular Party campaign has set its objective on revalidating the absolute majority. And it is not completely assured. He must defeat a thriving Galician Nationalist Bloc, led by Ana Pontón – the second political force in Galicia – and the socialist party, with which the nationalists could coalesce to take the government from him.
Against this threat – difficult, but not impossible to achieve according to the polls – the PP has placed the Catalan independence movement at the center of its campaign argument. “Galicia does not need Puigdemont,” warned Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the guest star, along with former president Mariano Rajoy, at the rally held in Pontevedra.
“Whether you are on the left or the right, what good can it do for Galicia if nationalism brings here the problems of social fracture in Euskadi or Catalonia?” asked the leader of the PP from the rostrum. “What good can the misgovernment that we are experiencing throughout Spain do to this land?” “Less selfishness and more generosity, less frivolity and posturing and more responsibility, less sovereignty and more autonomy, less Sánchez and more Rueda.”
Feijóo, who has predicted that “Galicia will be the answer that neither the independentists nor Sánchez want to hear”, accompanied this afternoon the president of the Xunta and candidate of the PP, Alfonso Rueda in a classic of the Galician electoral campaign, the rally of the PP in the bullring of Pontevedra which, once again, has been filled with militants as has happened in all the regional campaigns since 2009.
Pontevedra is an important place for the PP and according to polls here it could lose one of the 11 parliament deputies that Alberto Núñez Feijóo won in 2020 when he waged his last regional campaign. The Block could win a representative in this province.
In this bullring classic, where there were hardly any Spanish flags – the vast majority of those raised by the militants were Galician -, the former president of the Government Mariano Rajoy also participated, once again demonstrating his particular sense of humor. “I’m not here to talk about the Government and if I get distracted and make a comment it’s unintentionally.”
Genius and figure, he recalled that in this same bullring the PP held a rally in support of Feijóo in the elections on July 23. “We won the elections in Galicia and Spain, but a Frankenstein government with little respect for the results of the elections prevented us from governing. This cannot be repeated, neither in Spain nor in Galicia, because this cannot end well, and if not, at the same time””
Alfonso Rueda, the president of the Xunta and candidate to revalidate this position, was the last to speak. Rueda’s campaign avoids hostility. His motto is “the Galicia that works”, and in the background his speech insists on the idea of ??tranquility, of a community far from the political dispute in which its former president, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, is now involved in Madrid. One of the campaign ads refers to the region as an “island of stability.”
Rueda has asked for the vote to achieve the absolute majority that will allow him to continue governing and has outlined some of his most relevant electoral promises, among them, free education from the age of zero to university. Indeed, the PP has committed in this campaign to pay the university fees of Galician students, a promise to which the search for the young vote is not unrelated, where Rueda has one of its weak points in this campaign.
In her speech, preceded at the beginning by the number three of her candidacy, María Martínez from Pontevedra, she also defended Galician public health, another of the weak flanks of her management. Tomorrow, Sunday, in the Plaza del Obradoiro in Santiago, the SOS Public Health platform has called for a demonstration to which the leaders of the left-wing parties will attend. We’ll see if they can beat the bullring record this afternoon.
