The president of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, took advantage of his visit to the Basque Country to bless the relief at the heart of the Basque PP, delve into his desire to regionalize the party and, in particular, charge against Pedro’s possible pacts Sánchez for the investiture. In the morning, at the National Congress on Family Business held in Bilbao, presided over by the King, he criticized that “instead of talking about job creation and tax cuts, in Spain they are talking about self-determination and amnesty”; in the afternoon, in Gernika, he criticized the “ignominy” of EH Bildu “deciding the future” of Spain.
On the discursive level, Feijóo’s statements in Bilbao and Gernika had the common thread of criticism of Sánchez, whom he presented as a politician capable of agreeing to any content on the condition that he is invested. “It is undignified that politicians think more about themselves than about the citizens they serve. A politician, when he gives in to a condition imposed by another politician, is not generally serving the citizens”, he pointed out.
In Gernika, on the other hand, Feijóo channeled the criticism of Sánchez through criticism of EH Bildu. “What gesture has Bildu had with the victims of terrorism?”, he declared. The presence of the popular leader in Gernika, however, had a deeper political reading in a Basque key. A few days before, on November 4, the PP sealed the election of Javier de Andrés as Carlos Iturgaiz’s replacement at the head of the party in Euskadi, he wanted to publicly support this relief, cooked up from Genoa. In addition, under the Gernika tree, a symbol of Basque freedoms and self-government, he gave a speech that gives an idea of ??the parameters around which they want to move in the face of the spring Basque elections. Taking advantage of the 44th anniversary of the approval of the Statute of Gernika, Feijóo raised the flag of “autonomism”, vehemently defended this framework of self-government and even spoke of his “constitutional Galicianism”.
The Basque elections will, predictably, be the next electoral date on the horizon, and Génova attaches importance to them. The Basque PP remains close to its electoral floor, although in the last two elections it has managed to stop the loss of votes and timidly climb back up the flight. Feijóo and De Andrés are working on the construction of their own, autonomist discourse, which can attract voters disenchanted with the PNB. It is the Basque version of the regionalization of the PP that its leader is looking for, a bet that has been talked about since he arrived in Madrid and which, for the moment, has only been timidly shown in Euskadi.