As election day approaches, the non-belligerence between the groups on the left, which has characterized their temperament in the Galician campaign, is dissipating. There are attempts at mutual hostility. They are still incipient, but the tune is changing.
For two days now, the candidate for the presidency of the Galician Nationalist Bloc, Ana Pontón, has been asking for the same thing in various ways: the concentration of the vote around her choice. The Bloc as the only alternative. The message is: “Everything on the Block”.
On the opposite side, the Socialist Party is starting to drop some feathers in its rallies against “the party of no to everything” which, they say, has always been the Nationalist Bloc. In the polls, the BNG continues to grow, while the vote expectation for the Socialists, at best, they do not manage to surpass the result of 2020, when it placed 14 deputies in the Pazo do Hórreo, the seat of the Galician Parliament .
Pontón celebrated last night an event that was to some extent historic because he brought together in the tribune of a meeting held in Santiago Xosé Manuel Beiras, the father of modern Galician nationalism, and Martinho Noriega, the last crusader of the municipal tides. Neither of them supported him four years ago.
The Bloc believes, with the polls blowing in its favor and surely with the reason of the arithmetic of Mr. D’Hont on its side, that if it manages to reduce the dispersion of the left vote it is possible to overturn the absolute majority of the PP.
The BNG’s calls to grab the largest number of votes in its lists come just as its internal rivals, from the left, the Socialist Party of Galicia, led by José Ramón Gómez Besteiro; Sumar, headed by Marta Lois, and Podem, with Isabel Faraldo at the helm, will receive the support this weekend, in that order and each their own, from Pedro Sánchez, Yolanda Díaz and Ione Belarra and Irene Montero. A massive landing.
Díaz already spent the whole day yesterday accompanying Lois. Besteiro counted on Salvador Illa, with whom in the morning he went to cook orellas – a mass typical of the Entroido, the Galician carnival – and in the afternoon he participated in an event in Pontevedra.
It seems that Illa, like many of the politicians from outside who pass through Galicia, are surprised by the static nature of the PP campaign. “The world is changing – the leader of the Catalan Socialists warned them – and Galicia must change”.
Meanwhile, last night in Lalín, the PP showed again that its political muscles are still fit. On the billboard, the candidate of the PP, Alfonso Rueda, and Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the president of the Popular Party, who in this Lalín event closed the meeting. The usual thing in this kind of celebrations is for the candidate to be the last to speak. This was not the case and it doubled the intervention time of Alfonso Rueda.
Feijóo is fully committed to the campaign and it seems that he will spend all of next week – Congress has been idle during the Galician campaign – riding in his caravan parallel to that of the Galician leader of the PP.
In the event of Lalín, the leader of the PP was obstinate against the overwhelming electoral expectations of the Nationalist Bloc. Some surveys already estimate that it could exceed 29% of the votes, while the PP remains stuck a few tenths beyond 47%.
Feijóo returned to the beginning of its history and that of the Galician PP and claimed itself as “the party of the land”, as “the country’s PP, something to be proud of. And whoever has an inferiority complex – he added – should vote for the Galician Nationalist Bloc”. Lalín’s supporters applauded. Perhaps the PP is discovering, in the second part of the campaign that is now starting, that talking about Galicia is more profitable.
