When he arrived from Compostela to Madrid in the just beginning of the post-war period to take his second year of Law in 1940, Manuel Fraga discovered the hunger from which he had escaped in his province of Lugo. In his memoirs he said that in the capital he lost “nine kilos in six months, despite some packages that arrived from home.” Years later, as vice president of the Government of Carlos Arias Navarro, just after the death of Francisco Franco, of whom He had been a minister, it was legendary how attentive Fraga was in his official position to ensure that the chorizos sent to him from his Vilalba were not lost.
These food packages constituted a preview of the electoral energy contribution that Galicia would provide in 1981 to convert its Popular Alliance into one of the two great Spanish parties, unseating UCD at the head of the right-wing pole. This is a tradition that was renewed twice in this century by the second Galician to occupy the main office of the headquarters of the Popular Party since 1989 on Génova Street in Madrid, Mariano Rajoy. And it is the same one that the third Galician at the head of the Spanish right, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has now also signed up for, thanks to the victory of Alfonso Rueda on Sunday, which ensures the PP its longest period of uninterrupted dominance of the Xunta.
Galicia was confirmed on Sunday as the autonomous Macondo of the PP, the town of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which time is circular, with a cyclical repetition of events. Nothing better to close the circumference than the images of Feijóo and Rueda, surrounded by the party’s leadership, singing on Tuesday on Génova Street a version of the Xuntos by Juan Pardo, the bard of fraguismo through that song that the patron of the right became the party anthem. It constituted the musical expression of the project of unification of its entire ideological spectrum that it did not manage to execute in Spain, but it did in Galicia.
To turn the PPdeG into that common house, Fraga took the essential step in the Galician elections of 1981. Only the electoral ballots said that he was not running for those founding regional elections. Everything else conveyed the opposite message, from the posters, in which he was seen next to the extra candidate, the surgeon Gerardo Fernández Albor, to the motto itself, “galego coma ti” (Galician like you), through the exhausting campaign. , almost village by village, so that no one was left likely to support the popular party without being asked to vote.
As Fraga’s first heir to head the PP, José María Aznar, would later highlight, in 1981 in Galicia the then tiny Popular Alliance became a government party. The Xunta was the first great institution that it conquered by winning against the odds against a UCD that until then had devastated the Galician territory.
Although the conquest of the first absolute majority in 1989, with Fraga already as a candidate in Galicia, helped to shore up the project of the newborn Popular Party, the result of the refoundation of Alianza Popular, we had to wait until 2009 to attend the first reissue of the phenomenon of 1981, when from Galicia the closest thing in political terms to the packages with which Fraga resisted the Madrid famine in the 1940-1941 academic year, while Adolf Hitler took over Europe, returned to Génova Street.
These packages constitute a hallmark of Galicia’s identity, like the intersection of its powerful gastronomic identity and the massive emigration that it suffered for more than a century. It would be very strange if the vitally Galician Rajoy, although he is not Galician at all in the linguistic field, has not received a shipment of chorizo, lacón, local cheese or Padrón peppers. It is clear that in 2009 he collected the electoral energy contribution from his homeland, which, like Fraga in the past, he went to look for personally, with a until then unthinkable rural campaign.
With Feijóo’s first absolute majority, Rajoy headed towards Moncloa, where he was stuck, in office, after the general elections of 2015 and the repetition in June 2016. Feijóo’s third victory unlocked Rajoy’s re-election, after the fall of Pedro Sánchez as general secretary of the PSOE, days after the Galician elections. Although the future would show that it was an essential step to build his legend of resistance, the current President of the Government bit the dust after a Galician regional elections, precisely the one who speaks with passion about his experience in 2005, as a young and anonymous advisor of the campaign that brought the socialist Emilio Pérez Touriño to the presidency of the Xunta in coalition with the BNG.
On Sunday, Sánchez suffered a new Galician setback through his great personal friend José Ramón Gómez Besteiro, whom he recovered in a big way in 2023 when he emerged from seven years of ostracism, forced by the investigation of some alleged corruption crimes that came to nothing. In the result, the worst ever, despite the fact that the socialist federal leadership was much more involved than on other occasions, there are echoes of discontent with the amnesty that only the result of the European elections can be measured with any precision. At the moment, as Sánchez is sheltered in the Moncloa and shielded by his control of the party, the cost has nothing to do with the immediate bill for 2016.
It is also premature to evaluate the dose of oxygen that Feijóo has received since his Galician birthplace. Like his elders, Fraga and Rajoy, he went to the Galician pantry to look for political food, through his faithful heir Alfonso Rueda, and he obtained it, to prepare the way, with Euskadi in the middle, in the face of that victory in the European elections. of June that he longs for to compensate for the failure of last year’s general elections. Fraga’s formula from 1981 has worked in Madrid for him who in 2006 became his successor at the head of the PPdeG, although the doubt persists as to whether he will arrive at Moncloa like Rajoy or if his will be a frustrated dream like that of the boss.
Who also received a package from Galicia was the other leader of one of the main Spaniards born there, that of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz. But his contained huge pumpkins, like those from the Samaín festival, the Galician Halloween. Although in European, municipal and general elections there has recently been a majority of progressive votes in Galicia, the regional proteins flow only to the right.
