The Galician electoral campaign that concluded yesterday was conceived by the Popular Party as the continuation of the previous four, in which it obtained an absolute majority.
Despite the fact that this time the candidate was no longer Alberto Núñez Feijóo, but his successor, Alfonso Rueda, to whom Feijóo ceded the position two years ago, before leaving for Madrid, the message with which they began these fortnight was summed up in an idea: nothing has changed and nothing should change.
This is where the first slogan comes from: “Galicia, the island of stability”. In a world shaken by uncertainty, the Galician PP made its unique declaration of independence: the swagger from out there does not go with us.
But it didn’t work, of course. The collapse has been one of the factors that have helped to strengthen the current expectations of political change in Galicia, which concludes a campaign that has not escaped the battle without quarter that Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo are engaged in at the top .
If the PP loses the absolute majority this Sunday and is evicted from the Galician Government, Alberto Núñez Feijóo will suffer a serious setback in his own house that may complicate the already difficult relations with some of the party’s territorial leaders.
Sánchez, aware of the importance this defeat may have for the leader of the Popular Party, has strongly advocated a government of change in Galicia, even if it is not chaired by his candidate, the socialist José Ramón Gómez Besteiro, who, like Rueda, is running for the first time in these elections.
With hours to go before the schools open, there is genuine concern in the electoral team of the PP. To the mistakes that may have been made by Rueda’s team – that “don’t vote for me” in the golden minute of the Galicia Television debate that became a meme – is added the weakness of Feijóo in the parallel tour. lela to that of Rueda in which he has traveled half of Galicia with meetings in the morning, afternoon and night.
Some did not fill. In the Galician PP there are already those who recognize that the failure in Madrid, after the general elections of July 23, have made it lose the aura that surrounded it before in its own land.
In these meetings, Feijóo cried out against amnesty, against the independence supporters and the alliances of his adversary.
Until in the middle of the campaign, on the 10th, information linked to the highest management of the party was published in which it was recognized that the conversations with representatives of Junts, prior to the failed investiture of Feijóo, went beyond simple coffee and that on the table of that meeting was a proposal for an Amnesty law that would be rejected 24 hours later. This source added that pardons could be an admissible option for the PP under certain circumstances and meeting certain conditions.
The noise that Rueda was running away from was installed in the Galician campaign with all the noise after this leak.
One of the great mysteries of this story is why the leak happened at that moment. There are hypotheses for all tastes. But in Galicia there are those who attribute it fundamentally to an excess of confidence on the part of those who spoke in friendly territory – the information came from Galicia – and believed that the Galician campaign was already won. Of whom he spoke with the conviction that, deep down, nothing the privileged source said was relevant. But it was.
The dissemination of this information soon reached the headquarters of Ferraz and Moncloa, which, immediately, was attached to the argument with which the socialists were fighting in Galicia.
Former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who has thrown himself into the campaign like a rock star, acting as a luxury opening act for José Ramón Gómez Besterio, has spent a whole week propagating in all the auditoriums the “hypocrisy” of Feijóo Pedro Sánchez has done the same to his.
These elections have cost the Socialist Party of Galicia a lot. With a new candidate yet to be announced when Alfonso Rueda called the election in the middle of Christmas, his goal was to keep the 14 deputies he won in 2020. Now that goal looks difficult thanks to the rise of the Bloc Galician nationalist, who is capturing votes in the entire progressive orbit of the community.
Nevertheless, the predictable growth of the nationalists, led by Ana Pontón, does not particularly worry Ferraz, for whom the fundamental thing is to get the Popular Party out of the Xunta.
The Bloc is already an ally of the investiture of Pedro Sánchez and an eventual government in Galicia integrated by the BNG and the Galician Socialists would do nothing more than strengthen the alliance that Sánchez maintains with all the peripheral forces of the State and which, of moment, Feijóo does not manage to approach. In short, Sánchez’s PSOE has little to lose and much to gain in the Galician battle.
The same does not happen to the rest of the left-wing forces of national scope that are running in these elections, and in particular in Sumar. All published and unpublished polls now estimate that Yolanda Díaz’s party has no chance of entering the Galician Parliament. It will be a major setback for Díaz, who, as is known, began his political career in his homeland. It seems that the vice-president of the central government has given up her arms a few days ago, after taking a stab at some of the rallies called in support of her candidate and friend, Marta Lois.
Ironically, Podemos has continued on the same path, or worse, because, in reality, at no time has its candidate, Isabel Fajardo, had any kind of expectation of entering Parliament.
Having reached this point, and if, as expected, the result of these elections is elucidated in a handful of votes, it may be that on Sunday, or Monday, when the calculations begin, the conclusion will be reached that the change politician in Galicia has been lost in the thousands of voters who will have captured these forces without them being translated into seats in the Pazo do Horreo, the seat of the Galician Parliament.
