“I am convinced that now, or later, the next government in Spain will be from the PP.” This is how sure of his project and his game Alberto Núñez Feijóo has shown himself this Sunday. One month after the most complex investiture debate that the Popular Party has faced to date, its leader has opened the new political course surrounded by his territorial barons except those of Madrid, Valencia, Cantabria and La Rioja, with the conviction that It will be the year in which he becomes President of the Government.
Feijóo returned to his land and to a place marked by symbolism for the PP, the Soutomaior Castle that Mariano Rajoy rehabilitated as president of the Pontevedra Provincial Council, to launch a frantic countdown to get the investiture. To do this, he has surrounded himself with his hard core and the bulk of the territorial barons, Juanma Moreno, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, Fernando López Miras, María Guardiola, Jorge Azcón and Marga Prohens.
Significant were the absences, however, of the regional presidents of two of its main strongholds, Madrid and Valencia, Isabel Díaz Ayuso and Carlos Mazón, as well as the leaders of Cantabria and La Rioja, María José Sáenz de Buruaga and Gonzalo Capellán. In his absence, he was supported by former Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and members of the National Management Committee, Borja Semper or Cuca Gamarra.
Feijóo wanted to make a show of force and it came out round, with a security in his political project that does not make him forget that the inauguration of September 26 and 27 may be unsuccessful in the absence of four supports to add to the 172 already guaranteed . In any case, “although it is not an investiture in the short term, it will be the first stone of the next Government of Spain.”
Núñez Feijóo will begin a round of contacts this week to guarantee the investiture entrusted to him by Felipe VI, meeting “with the political groups who want to speak” and “with all the regional presidents who want to contribute”, with the intention of being “the president of all Spaniards and not the president of some Spaniards in conflict with the rest”.
As a premise, it already warns: “We will not admit auctions to appease the particular interests of minorities.” And he announces his intention that “the time in which those who did not think like you were silenced is over”, with a red line of not falling into the “political, territorial, economic and existential abyss” nor in the “four big assignments that distance President Sánchez from the investiture”.
The amnesty “contrary to the Constitution”, the independence referendum “unbecoming of one of the oldest nations in the world”, the “weakest government that perhaps Spain could have” made up of 24 parties and “again breaking the principle of equality “Of all the Spaniards are, for Feijóo, those four assignments. And for the PP to get the four votes that it lacks to guarantee the investiture “it will not be good for the PP, it would be good for Spain”, moving away from these four threats.
Defender of dialogue against “imposition” and of the “shared values ??agreement” against the “assignment and blackmail agreement”, Feijóo defended before 1,500 officials and PP militants and before his replacement in Galicia, Alfonso Rueda, that “politics is talking” and that “the investiture agreement involves talking to those who want to talk.” In these next few weeks, he will dedicate himself to “talking, yes; dialogue, too; but blackmail, no; auctions, no; submitting to what the minorities want, no.”
Eager to “return to that cordial Spain that has made an exemplary transition”, Feijóo presented in Soutomaior the “master lines of the investiture in compliance with the mandate of the Head of State”, and insisted that, for this investiture, he has “what more important”, the “legitimacy of having won the elections”, although he wanted to clarify that “those who have lost it have not yet accepted it”.
This complex political course begins in a place marked by symbolism, as the PP returns this year to Soutomaior Castle, its traditional location for this late-summer event since 2007, from which it was “exiled” seven years ago when the bipartisan PSOE- BNG assumed the Provincial Council and prohibited political acts in the area, exiling them to the municipality of Cerdedo-Cotobade, also in Pontevedra.
The president of the PP and the Provincial Council of Pontevedra, Luís López, Lugués, described it as an “act of restitution of freedom, of justice” because “the Castle of Soutomaior is recovered for the citizens.” Feijóo himself applauded this return because it means that the party has put an end to “the most sectarian provincial government of democracy”, alluding to the previous bipartisan, chaired by the president of the Galician PSOE and current senator Carmela Silva, “an example of sectarianism that we have to eliminate from political life”.
In this return, both the schedule and the duration of the act were conditioned by one of the fundamental uses of this venue: the holding of events. Two hours after the start of the popular event, a wedding was being held and the PP stage had to be dismantled in a hurry to guarantee its celebration.
“It is better to lose the investiture and for Spain not to lose,” insisted Feijóo, who has advanced that in his speech for the investiture in Congress he will present a battery of economic and “institutional regeneration” proposals. “If the investiture only depends on giving in more, on bowing to those who want to leave Spain, on humiliating the institutions, that investiture will be won by Sánchez, but Spain will lose it,” he said.
Feijóo will attempt this investiture, but not “at any price” because he wants to be “a free president and not kidnapped to be able to name the Council of Ministers and be at the service of Spain and not out of personal ambition.” Similar was the argument used by the president of the Xunta, convinced that he will not give in to the blackmail of “exclusionary and selfish nationalisms.”
