Either Vox negotiates very well or the PP negotiates very badly. In the end, the president of Murcia, the only one who seemed willing to resist, ended up giving in, and the far-right formation managed to enter all the regional governments in which the numbers gave it some chance. As of this week, there are five autonomous communities in which Vox is part of the government, and its territorial power already reaches more than eleven million people, almost a quarter of the Spanish population.
Let’s do a brief recap. In Murcia, the PP only needed two Vox seats for an absolute majority, two seats that have ended up becoming single ministries, including a vice-presidency. On the other hand, only the remaining eight will correspond to the twenty-one regional deputies of the PP: these ministries have been very cheap for one, very expensive for the other. The agreement is not very different from the one reached in Aragon, where also a small number of seats translated into two ministries and a vice-presidency in the hands of Vox. In Castilla y León and the Valencian Community, with a slightly higher representation, Vox gained control of three ministries. Only the president of Extremadura, a woman of liberal temperament whom the national leadership of the party hastened to put down, has managed to stop the far-right formation a little, granting it only a ministerial position in a government of ten. The conclusion is simple: Vox is overrepresented in four of these five regional governments.
The truth is that it is not understood why, after the sustained invitation, the president from Murcia has decided to screw it up at the last moment. Three months wrapping the trocha to end up accepting Vox’s initial demands? These negotiations are like Rebel Without a Cause car races, in which whoever jumped out of the vehicle just before it plunged down a ravine won. Fernando López Miras has been pampered and is now licking his wounds in the mud of the road. This price, that of humiliating the government partner, has also been paid by the others. I am no one to make predictions about an election that will not even materialize, but it is known that in electoral repeats voters tend to concentrate around the big parties and to punish the culprit of the repeat, which in this case would be Vox . If López Miras had not taken the cangueli, the one that would have ended up being upset would have been Vox.
A new election in Murcia would also have served as a thermometer of the variations in the conservative camp. There are reasons to think that Vox is a party in decay. In the last general elections, he lost nineteen deputies and more than six hundred thousand votes. Among the volatile seats are five of the six he had in Castilla y León, which means that his execution in the regional government, of which he has been part for more than a year, is far from bordering on approved The fact that one of its founders, Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, has left the ship without giving too many explanations does not speak very well of the state of health of the organization either. It could be that Vox will disappear very soon, just as Ciutadans has disappeared, which only four years ago (four years!) touched the sky when it obtained no less than fifty-seven deputies. A bad result for Vox in an electoral repeat in Murcia could have given him the coup de grace.
But it seems that, in reality, the one who has taken the cangueli is Feijóo, who, like the protagonist of Ninette y un señor de Murcia, refuses to leave his four walls. This from Feijóo and Vox is like that from the old song: “Ni contigo ni sin ti”. With Vox it is not enough to govern and without Vox, which is how the PP has always governed, even less. It is clear that, unlike the PSOE, which has always had parties with parliamentary representation on the left, the PP has been the eternal master and lord of the right wing. Only when the voters who left for Vox return to the fold will he be in a position to govern. The question is why he is taking so long to stand up to his true rival, who is after all a scion of the same stem.
