Since Alberto Núñez Feijóo endorsed the candidacy of Alejandro Fernández in Barcelona on March 27, the president of the PP has made clear the importance he attaches to the Catalan campaign. From Lleida, yesterday he defended the need to return to political centrism in Catalonia, the recovery of a political space that allows, he said, “to solve the problems of the citizens and not cause them, that allows to focus on the management”.
It was his third visit to Catalonia in this pre-campaign that the PP started on March 27, and Feijóo is drawing a speech with two lines that he wants to converge. On the one hand, he denounced the “total lack of respect” of the Spanish Government towards the problems of Catalonia; on the other, the “inaction and laziness” of the management of the nationalist executives of the Generalitat. After the visit to an agri-food cooperative, he criticized the Government’s lack of investment in water infrastructure and pointed out that 700 million euros from the 2023 budget have not been implemented. He also denounced the disinterest of the Moncloa for the main problem facing Catalonia today, with reference to the drought.
The popular leader wants to denounce that the “bad management” in Catalonia comes from the long period of the process, from the ideological confrontation. It is not Catalonia’s problems that generate nationalism, but it is precisely “nationalism that generates the difficulties facing Catalan society”, he pointed out.
In this commitment to the need for Catalan politics to recover centrism, he offered a political project that “does not incite confrontation but union”. Feijóo asked for the support of those who prefer “open and not closed” ideologies, defended the construction of a “cosmopolitan” Catalonia and pointed out that the PP is a party that represents “diversity”. He addressed those who “want to turn the tide of the process and focus on the real problems”.
Feijóo tries to chart a moderate course in Catalonia with a tone different from that used by the PP in its opposition to the Government of Pedro Sánchez. He spoke yesterday of the need for the political class to “stop causing problems for people”.
In the appearance before the media, the leader also referred to the support of the lawyer of the European Court of Justice for Carles Puigdemont’s appeal to be recognized as an MEP. “I congratulate – he said – all those who have favorable resolutions and I hope that they will also submit to the resolutions of other courts even if they are not favorable to them”. Likewise, he considered that the CIS survey published yesterday, which gives growth to the PSOE despite coinciding with the Koldo case, is a “joke that they don’t even believe themselves”.
The leader of the PP was accompanied by the candidate, Alejandro Fernández, the head of the campaign, Dolors Montserrat, and the number one for Lleida, Montse Berenguer. In terms of agriculture and livestock, Fernández defended the elimination of administrative barriers and the need for free trade to “develop under equal conditions” with products arriving from outside.
