We will return to Soutomaior, the popular ones proclaimed in 2016, at the opening of the political course by Mariano Rajoy in the “carballeira” (oak grove) of San Xusto, in the Pontevedra municipality of Cerdedo-Cotobade. The proclamations in the style of the American General Douglas McArthur, when in the Second World War the Japanese force forced him to leave the Philippines, made reference to the fact that the PP had just been evicted by the PSOE from what was politically his castle, although the ownership was of the Provincial Council of Pontevedra, an institution that had governed from 1983 to 2015.
It seemed like an indestructible fiefdom, in which Mariano Rajoy, president from 1983 to 1986, had begun his career as ruler. The PSOE and the BNG had taken over the councils of Lugo and A Coruña and then, now no longer, that of Ourense rather than the PP was from the Baltar family. But the beginning of the overwhelming majorities of the socialist Abel Caballero in Vigo, together with the dominance of the city of Pontevedra by the nationalist Fernández Lores, gave the PSOE and BNG alliance the Pontevedra Provincial Council in 2015. And control of the castle.
Already that summer the new socialist president, Carmela Silva, warned that political acts could not be held in the castle. And so the PP celebrated the opening of its political course for the last time there, until tomorrow, with another Galician at the helm, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, a month after his more than difficult investiture session.
Before the expulsion, it was already part of a tedious ritual for Rajoy to remember that this medieval fortress, very close to the Vigo estuary, was acquired during his tenure in the Provincial Council and that its rehabilitation was coordinated by the then vice-president José Antonio Rueda, father of Alfonso Rueda. , current president of the Xunta.
It was precisely an electoral billiards move designed by Alfonso Rueda and his successors at the head of the PP of Pontevedra, together with the fortune and the overconfidence of the PSOE that allowed the popular to recover this deputation in May. They achieved it with the lowest result of the four Galician provinces, 36.7%, a few tenths below that of A Coruña and seven points behind that of Lugo, both from the Socialist Party, allied with the BNG.
“I did not expect this result at all,” the surprised socialist Carmela Silva later acknowledged. On the other hand, in the PP they were convinced weeks before that if in Vigo, Caballero dropped from his 67% of 2019 to 60%, with the increases expected in the metropolitan area and in Pontevedra, the deputation would fall, as happened, although the PSOE from Vigo got almost 61%. A carambola has returned the keys to the fortress to the PP.
