The Popular Party’s campaign for the February 18 elections in Galicia has set the goal of revalidating the absolute majority. And it is not completely secured. He has to beat a powerful Nationalist Bloc, led by Ana Pontón – the second political force in Galicia – and the Socialist Party, with which the nationalists could ally to seize the government.
Against this threat – difficult, but not impossible to achieve according to the polls -, the PP has placed Catalan independence at the center of its campaign argument. “Galicia does not need Puigdemont”, warned party president Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the guest star, with ex-president Mariano Rajoy, at the meeting held yesterday afternoon in Pontevedra.
“Whether it’s from the left or the right, what good can it do to Galicia if nationalism brings here the problems of social fracture of the Basque Country or Catalonia?” asked the leader of the PP from the podium. “What good can the misgovernment that we are living in all of Spain bring to this land?”. “Less selfishness and more generosity, less frivolity and posturing and more responsibility, less sovereignty and more autonomy, less Sánchez and more Rueda”.
Feijóo, who predicted that “Galicia will be the answer that neither the pro-independence parties nor Sánchez want to hear”, accompanied the president of the Xunta and PP candidate, Alfonso Rueda, in a classic of the Galician electoral campaign, the PP rally in the Pontevedra bullring which, once again, managed to be filled with supporters, as has been the case in all regional campaigns since 2009.
Pontevedra is an important seat for the PP and according to polls, it could lose one of the 11 members of Parliament that Alberto Núñez Feijóo won in 2020, when he ran his last regional campaign. The Nationalist Bloc could win a representative in this province.
Former Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy also took part in this classic of the bullring, who once again demonstrated his particular sense of humor. “I don’t come to talk about the Government and if I get distracted and make a comment it’s unintentional.” He dedicated a large part of his intervention, and clearly, not for good, to his successor in office, Pedro Sánchez.
Genius and figure, he recalled that in this same bullring the PP held a rally in support of Feijóo in the elections of July 23. “We won the elections in Galicia and in Spain, but a Frankenstein government with little respect for the results of the elections prevented us from governing. This cannot be repeated, neither in Spain nor in Galicia, because this will not end well and, if not, time after time”.
Alfonso Rueda, the president of the Xunta and candidate to revalidate this position, was the last to speak. Rueda’s campaign avoids hostility. Its slogan is “Galicia that works” and at the bottom of its speech it insists on the idea of ??tranquility, of a community far removed from the politics in which its previous president, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has now embarked, there in Madrid . One of the campaign ads refers to the region as an “island of stability”.
Rueda asked for the vote to obtain an absolute majority that would allow him to continue governing and he revealed some of his most relevant electoral promises, among them free education from the age of zero until university. Indeed, the PP s has committed in this campaign to pay the university tuition fees of the Galician students, a promise that is no stranger to the search for the young vote, in which Rueda has one of his weak points in this campaign.
In his intervention, preceded at the beginning by the number three of his candidacy, that of Pontevedra María Martínez, he also defended Galician public health, another of the weak sides of his management. Today, in the Plaza de l’Obradoiro de Santiago, the SOS Sanidade Pública platform has called a demonstration to which the leaders of the left parties will go. We’ll see if they manage to beat yesterday afternoon’s bullring record.
