The Galician electoral campaign that concluded this Friday was conceived by the Popular Party as the continuation of the previous four in which it had obtained an absolute majority.
Although on this occasion the candidate was no longer Alberto Núñez Feijóo but his successor Alfonso Rueda, to whom Feijóo handed over the position two years ago before leaving for Madrid, the message with which these fifteen days began was summed up in one idea: nothing has changed and nothing should change.
Hence its first motto: “Galicia, the island of stability.” In a world shaken by uncertainty, the Galician PP made its singular declaration of independence: the hubbub outside is not with us.
But it hasn’t worked, of course. The hubbub has been one of the factors that has contributed to strengthening the current expectations of political change in Galicia with which a campaign that has not escaped the relentless battle waged in the heights by Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo concludes.
If the PP loses its absolute majority this Sunday and is evicted from the Galician Government, Alberto Núñez Feijóo will suffer a serious setback in his own home that could complicate his already difficult relations with some of the party’s territorial leaders.
Sánchez, aware of the importance that this defeat may have for the leader of the Popular Party, has bet heavily on a government of change in Galicia, even if it is not chaired by his candidate, the socialist José Ramón Gómez Besteiro, who, like Rueda, is running for the first time in these elections.
Within hours of the polling stations opening, there is real concern in the PP’s electoral team. Added to the mistakes that Rueda’s team may have made – that “don’t vote for me” from the golden minute of the Galician Television debate that became a meme – is Feijóo’s weakness on his tour parallel to Rueda’s, in which he has toured half of Galicia with morning, afternoon and night rallies.
In some it did not fill. In the Galician PP there are already those who recognize that his failure in Madrid, after the general elections of July 23, have made him lose that aura that surrounded him before in his own land.
In those rallies, Feijóo cried out against the amnesty, against the independentists and his adversary’s alliances.
Until in the middle of the campaign, on the 10th, information linked to the highest leadership of the party was published in which it was recognized that the conversations with representatives of Junts, prior to Feijóo’s failed investiture, went beyond simple coffee and that a proposed amnesty law was left on the table at that meeting that would be rejected 24 hours later. That source added that pardons could be an admissible option for the PP in certain circumstances and under certain conditions.
The hubbub from which Rueda fled settled in the Galician campaign with all the noise after that leak.
One of the great mysteries of this story is why this leak occurred just at that moment. There are hypotheses for all tastes. But in Galicia there are those who attribute it fundamentally to an overconfidence of those who spoke in friendly territory – the information came from Galicia – and believed that the Galician campaign was won in advance. Of whom he spoke with the conviction that, deep down, nothing that that privileged source said was relevant. But it was.
The dissemination of this information soon reached Ferraz’s headquarters and the Moncloa, which was immediately attached to the arguments with which the socialists were fighting in Galicia.
The former president of the government José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who has thrown himself into the campaign like a rock star, acting as a luxury opening act for José Ramón Gómez Bestio, has spent an entire week propagating Feijóo’s “hypocrisy” in all the auditoriums. Pedro Sánchez has done the same in his own.
These elections have been difficult for the Party of Socialists of Galicia. With a new candidate, who had yet to be announced when Alfonso Rueda called the elections in the middle of Christmas, his objective was to maintain the 14 deputies he obtained in 2020. Now that objective seems difficult thanks to the strength of the Galician Nationalist Bloc, which He is capturing votes throughout the progressive orbit of the community.
However, the foreseeable growth of the nationalists, led by Ana Pontón, does not particularly worry Ferraz, for whom the fundamental thing is to get the Popular Party out of the Xunta.
The Bloc is already an ally of Pedro Sánchez’s investiture and a possible government in Galicia made up of the BNG and the Galician socialists would only reinforce that alliance that Sánchez maintains with all the peripheral forces of the State and to which, for the moment , Feijóo cannot get closer. In short, Sánchez’s PSOE has little to lose and much to gain in the Galician battle.
The same does not happen to the rest of the state-wide leftist forces that compete in these elections, and in particular to Sumar. All published and unpublished polls now estimate that Yolanda Díaz’s party has no chance of entering the Galician Parliament. It will be a major failure for Díaz, who, as is known, began her political career in this her land. It seems that the vice president of the Government has given up on her days ago after playing at some of the rallies called for her in support of her candidate and her friend Marta Lois.
Ironically, Podemos has followed the same path, or worse, because in reality, at no time has its candidate, Isabel Fajardo, had the slightest expectation of entering Parliament.
This being the case, and if, as expected, the result of these elections is elucidated in a handful of votes, it may be that on Sunday, or Monday, when we begin to do the math, we will reach the conclusion that the political change in Galicia has been lost in the thousands of voters that these forces will have monopolized without translating them into seats in the Pazo do Horreo, the headquarters of the Galician Parliament.
