At the 2018 summer congress he was about to compete for the succession of Mariano Rajoy at the head of the PP. In the end he didn’t. The attack, which was mainly carried out by the arch-enemies Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría and María Dolores de Cospedal, ended up winning the third in discord: Pablo Casado. Alberto Núñez Feijóo chose to remain in Galicia, observing from a distance. He had prepared a speech announcing his candidacy to lead the PP and another resigning. He ended up reading the second, the one who said that the priority was Galicia and his family.
This time everything has been different. There is no option. Can’t choose speech. After the duel to the death between Isabel Díaz Ayuso and Pablo Casado, Feijóo had no room for manoeuvre. The party was broken and bleeding. I had to take the helm yes or yes. Anything else would be a catastrophe for the party.
Everyone in the PP agrees -has gathered 55,000 endorsements- in which Feijóo is the solution to get the party founded by the also Galician Manuel Fraga out of the quagmire. So, starting this April, the president of Galicia will have to start rebuilding and, along with that, build a solid alternative to the PSOE by Pedro Sanchez.
When Casado was elected president in the 2018 congress, he was 37 years old. Feijóo will be 61 in September. His long career, in the party, in the institutions, endorses him and is what the leaders, but also the militants, of the PP appreciate the most. Right now, the party is not to be left again in the hands of youngsters nor is it for experiments. Can’t fail again. And the furthest thing from an experiment has a name and surname: Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
The two systemic parties, of State, the PSOE and the PP, have suffered the consequences of political fragmentation, so common nowadays. Imperfect bipartisanship is much more imperfect than it used to be. The PSOE governs with United We Can and with the parliamentary oxygen of other groups. The PP, the day it conquers power, He won’t do it alone either. He will need Vox (or a pact with the socialists, unthinkable today).
As with Married, Vox -which gives the impression that each day he gains weight a little more- It will continue to be decisive for the future of the conservative party, for the future of Feijóo’s PP.
Summarizing a lot, the popular they will be healthier and stronger if they manage to stop or force Santiago Abascal’s men to back down. Casado tried and failed because of his lurches, his continuous swings, now moving away, now approaching the extreme right. Vox was eating ground because it did not have a clear strategy, which, in the end, amounts to the same as having no strategy at all.
Ayuso, the president of Madrid, was able to finish off Casado, in a dramatic express assassination, because she wins elections. It doesn’t matter her blunders, her chulapo populism, her intellectual inconsistency. In the elections of the Community of Madrid on May 4, she swept it. The PP jumped from 30 to 65 deputies. The PSOE lost 13 seats and Vox, 1. The 26 seats of Ciudadanos evaporated without a trace. Ayuso, who embodies the PP closest to Vox, governs alone in Madrid.
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Feijóo also wins elections. The last time in 2020. In Galicia, the PP also governs alone (in this case with an absolute majority). Beyond the clear favor of his countrymen, he has few other things in common with Ayuso. Feijóo represents the opposite of her in the PP. It embodies sobriety and moderation, also in the shapes. The worst stain on his record is his old friendship with drug trafficker Marcial Dorado, immortalized in photos of the two of them having a good time on the latter’s yacht.
In politics there are two talents that are practically everything: knowing how to manage time and knowing how to manage distances. We will see if Feijóo knows how to put them at the service of the PP to exorcise the curse of Vox. For now, he has chosen to leave the unpleasant decision of governing with Vox in Castilla y León in the hands of his co-religionist Alfonso Fernández Mañueco. We will see if Feijóo wants and can reduce the Castilian pact to the exception or, on the contrary, what happened indicates the path that the PP is going to follow from now on