The PP of Carlos Mazón and MarÃa José Català , candidates for the Generalitat and the Valencia City Council, has designed a Valencian campaign in which the symbolic association Pedro Sánchez-Ximo Puig becomes, for the moment, an outstanding strategic element perceptible in numerous acts and press releases. MarÃa José Catalá, for example, who is also a trustee of the party, insists a lot on developing this argument at the municipal level, from the hypothesis, it is understood, that establishing this political framework will deteriorate the Valencian president in the face of 28M. “Voting for Ximo Puig is voting for Sánchez”, recalls the Valencian candidate. In parallel, this association is confronted with a second argumentative axis consequence of the first: these are for the Valencian PP, and from other geographies, a plebiscite election between Pedro Sánchez and Núñez Feijóo. Isabel DÃaz Ayuso is the one who has taken this methodology the furthest.
The popular Valencians pay attention to what the polls say; that more than half of Valencians vote in a national key in regional and local ones. But in the past, his strategy was not always like this. At the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the current millennium, the polls indicated that the party that best defended the interests of the Valencians was the PP led by Eduardo Zaplana and, later, by Francisco Camps. The first used “Valencian power†as a slogan to defeat Joan Lerma, and the second generated a powerful figurative narrative based on emblems of Valencianism such as the Monastery of Santa MarÃa de La Valldigna, founded by Jaume II. Popular electoral campaigns had a strong regional and local component, even more so since the absorption of Unión Valenciana. It was the party of Rita Barberá, a political force that, de facto, behaved like a regionalist party. There was a moment, between 2003 and 2009, in which “the Valencian” was for the Spanish PP the appropriate reference to mobilize voters from other geographies. Times in which Barberá was the “mayor of Spain” and in which Camps saved the political life of Mariano Rajoy in the PP congress of Valencia in 2008, the same in which Aznarism began its decline.
Eight years in the opposition have, logically, radically varied the discourse of the Valencian PP, in need of eroding what for the left are strengths, as the polls indicate, such as the figure of Ximo Puig. At the moment, the facts point to a radio campaign, in which leaders such as Ayuso, who called for the recovery of the “axis of prosperity” between Madrid and Valencia, or Almeida, have achieved a strong role in our autonomy, and in which Feijóo It has been and will be very present. Nothing says that this change of strategic direction of the PP is a mistake, it could even be successful because nothing has been decided, according to the polls. It remains to be known what the campaign message will be, and the main argument, of Carlos Mazón. Soon
