During the tough debate with Pedro Sánchez this Wednesday, Alberto Núñez Feijóo recognized for the first time his new role in front of locals and strangers. “It is a tremendous responsibility,” he said, “to lead the opposition to a government that has committed the greatest attack on the rule of law in recent democracy.” The sentence implied two important ideas. On the one hand, the president of the PP has already assumed his role, that of leader of the opposition, a position in which, according to many party members, he does not feel comfortable because he has dedicated most of his political life to governing. And on the other hand, he believes he is doing it at an extraordinary moment. Feijóo is preparing for the next stage of resistance until a new opportunity arises to challenge Sánchez for power. The popular leader is reflecting on his new team and opposition style as he tries to harness the anger that exists on the right against the new progressive government and prevent it from being overtaken.
Feijóo delighted the PP in the investiture debate with a very harsh speech against Sánchez, in which he accused him of having committed a “fraud” and an “exercise of corruption” by coming to power by agreeing to an amnesty law which he rejected before the elections. The music of his intervention suggested that Sánchez’s government was an illegitimate government because it was born of a deception, but with regard to the lyrics, the leader of the PP finally recognized that the socialist leader was endowed with “a legitimate parliamentary majority”. is an exercise of normality. Institution that is putting its foot up against the wall in the face of the highest speeches from the extreme right and its own party. The leader of the PP will play this double game, but whether he chooses one side or the other depends in part on which profiles accompany him in the new phase. The Galician politician does not say a word, which worries the party, which believes that change is urgent.
“You don’t know Feijóo. Not even the collar of his shirt knows.
The sentence comes from one of his closest aides, who is used to the greatest possible discretion with which the PP leader handles information about his appointments. The changes will be profound, it is said in Feijóo’s immediate environment, because the media projection of half a dozen previously unknown faces will be sought and because Cuca Gamarra will lose one of its two posts, secretary general and speaker. Congress. However, sources close to the leader indicate that he was not on the membership list given the organic revolution that he was contemplating a few weeks ago when he asked for information on the appointment of a new general secretary of the party after being elected in the last congress “Everything now indicates” that Gamarra will retain second place while losing the speakership in Parliament.
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Feijóo has ruled out the organic reorganization of the scope of competence, which would mean the appointment of a new Secretary General, because to do so he had to use an “abbreviation of the Statutes” and the “orthodox” approach is to wait for the next Congress to change the organic number two, point this out to those around you. So this means that by retaining the Secretary General, Gamarra will continue to sit next to Feijóo in the parliamentary seat, although the leader appoints a new speaker of parliament, and that he will also question the vice-presidents of the government in the control sessions. Therefore, the new spokesman in Feijóo’s team does not need to have a “media profile” so much as he needs someone “who is organizationally capable of leading the group”.
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Several members of the steering committee point to the Deputy Minister of Social Policy, Carmen Fúnez, deputy of Ciudad Real, who has been in favor of this position in the PP all her life. “Fúnez knows the party because she belongs to the new generation, is a woman and knows how to stand firm. The important political debates are led by Feijóo, she compensates him socially,” says a hard-core leader, who believes that “there is no internal environment for a change of secretary general because the team has done a good job, even though they have “It was not possible to govern,” and the message would otherwise be that it was not done well.” “We won the elections,” claims this leader. “We didn’t see the failure of the polls, but it wasn’t just Cuca’s fault, just no one saw it.” Various members of the leadership committee insist on the idea that Feijóo will not revolutionize his leadership, because that would be like doing so disavow. “It will be minimal adjustments because this team won the elections,” defends another key leader.
However, no one knows Feijóo’s plans, which gives conflicting signals about what style of opposition he is seeking. This week he brought to the fore his deputy organizing secretary, Miguel Tellado, who put on a tough profile to say that Sánchez “should leave Spain in the trunk of a car,” alluding to Carles Puigdemont’s escape to Waterloo. And also to Esteban González Pons – his court adviser, who has been out of the spotlight for months – who defended on Twitter that Sánchez was “the Viktor Orbán of the South”, alluding to the ultra-conservative prime minister of Hungary, whom he faced from the European Union criticized for their illiberal tendencies. And he added to that tweet by writing “Help Spain.”
Feijóo himself always moves in an impossible balance of “firmness in moderation,” says the PP, which in reality is more of a permanent game on the precipice to which the atmosphere of anger on the right drives him. Anger is spreading inside and outside his party. Outside, the far right staged protests outside the PSOE headquarters on Ferraz Street that have turned violent, with scenes of burning containers and confrontations with police, as well as Nazi and dictatorship symbols. Meanwhile, the PP is being pressured to surrender to an anti-system opposition, in an environment where fifty retired Franco soldiers have asked the army for a coup.
Inside, Feijóo also has to contend with voices like that of the President of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who became the protagonist of Sánchez’s inauguration when she was filmed by the congressional cameras calling the socialist leader a “son of a bitch.” from the visitors’ gallery when he mentioned his inner war with Pablo Casado. Far from backing down, Ayuso justified these words with the game he wanted to say: “I like fruit.” And “I like fruit” has become a viral slogan of the right to express the hostility they to Pedro Sánchez.
Feijóo has to play in this area after trying to come to power until the last, as the PNV showed this week by revealing that the people have offered them to occupy the Ministry of Industry in return for their support, as the PP denies. The management team believes that he has good cards for the new game. “In the end the situation is not that bad. It would have been a nightmare to govern with the support of PNV and Vox, he would have become the first president who failed to pass a single law, and now the rejection that the amnesty law has generated is making it easy for him .” The proof, they emphasize, is that tens of thousands of people took to the streets again this Saturday against the clemency measure.
At the moment, no one is contesting Feijóo’s leadership, although everyone in the opposition knows the review is permanent. He must also be able to stand up to resistance. Just in case, his friend Mariano Rajoy came forward to support him the day after the election of the new socialist president: “Alberto Núñez Feijóo is, as we saw last Wednesday, the person who is the best intellectually, politically and morally prepared for tears.” Tearing down this wall of sectarianism that some insist on erecting.”
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