There is – at the moment – pretty good agreement on the marriage of PP and Vox, where they can get along together, despite some of the scenes that took place in the House of Representatives this week, it seems. In the five autonomous communities governed by coalition leaders of the two parties – Valencian Community, Aragon, Castile and León, Murcia and Extremadura – the alliance is deepening with the approval of the first joint budgets that all cabinets will carry out in the coming weeks. With one exception, the Balearic Islands, because the Ultras support the PP from outside and get paid for it by blowing up several games and forcing them to give in to various ideological demands. But Vox is working with a double game – the tension in Congress, where Santiago Abascal went out this Tuesday to attack Alberto Núñez Feijóo, and the stability in the autonomy pacts – that keeps the PP on alert. The popular watch their partner's electoral defeat and fear his reaction. “From now until March we will have peace, but as the European elections in June approach, God will say,” warns a popular president who has Vox in his government.
The PP interprets Abascal's attack on Feijóo this week as a sign of weakness. The leader of the extreme right devoted half of his speaking time in the parliamentary debate on the amnesty law to disqualifying the PP as a “simulation of the opposition” that was “not up to date” and even brought up the photo of Feijóo of the drug trafficker Marcial Dorado, one of the issues that concerns the PP boss the most because it affects him personally. Abascal's speech outraged the PP's national leadership. “Vox is wrong,” popular leadership sources said as soon as Abascal left the platform. “You have to decide who to stand against,” complained the PP.
The PP believes that the leader of Vox is wrong in attacking Feijóo, “just as Pablo Casado was wrong when he personally attacked Abascal in the first motion of censure by Vox,” analyzes a popular regional president who has partners. “There is a part of the PP and Vox electorate that is very united. If Abascal takes on the PP, he will lose the border areas with us. He thinks he can win back votes if he shakes us, but the right doesn't want us to fight,” he interprets.
The popular believe that Vox is pursuing a “defensive strategy” typical of a party that is sinking in the polls. According to the December barometer of 40dB. For EL PAÍS, Vox opposes itself as the third force in a tough fight with Sumar, obtaining 11.5% of the vote and 30 deputies, but losing nine tenths and losing three deputies in Congress compared to 23-J. “We have already seen it with Ciudadanos and Podemos: when a party loses, it tends to radicalize to maintain its electoral position,” says another president of the PP, who governs together with Vox. “You are disoriented. The municipal projects went well, but the general ones went poorly. They lost leaders like Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, and with the strategy of agitating against the amnesty in the streets, we toasted them,” says another of his colleagues.
Vox's electoral decline, while still tentative, parallels the progress of the PP, which has seen chain gains every month since July. According to the same poll, the PP would get 35% of the vote today, almost two points more than in the elections, and 147 seats, ten more than now. “We are in the process of expanding the PP,” defends another PP baron. “But I have serious doubts that Vox will disappear,” he warns. “The question is: What is Vox?” he asks. “Angry people. And now, with this government, they are even angrier.”
Abascal's broadside against Feijóo in Congress on Tuesday followed an earlier attack against him by the PP leader. Feijóo had condemned the words of the leader of the far right in Buenos Aires when he said about Sánchez that “there will be a moment when people want to hang him by his feet.” The PP spokesman Borja Sémper, who said in his Criticism of the Ultras always goes one step further, accusing Abascal of “causing violence” with these words. And in parallel, Vox launched an attack against one of the leaders closest to Feijóo, the deputy secretary Esteban González Pons, based on information from OkDiario published this Monday, which claims that the son of the deputy secretary, Esteban González Guitart , in 2017 was a deputy at the Russian energy company Gazprom, while González Pons served as a MEP. Foul play has also found its way into the rivalry between the two parties.
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The PP could also take action against Vox to weaken it, but its territorial power alliance prevents this. “Joint governments are our Achilles heel,” admits a Feijóo leader. The barons, who share their cabinets with the far right, are asking their leader to ignore them rather than shoot against Vox. “The strategy must be to ignore Vox. Feijóo did well to condemn Abascal's words about the people who wanted to hang Sánchez by his feet, but now he should ignore them again,” this regional president calls on the PP leader.
For its part, Genoa did not provide any specific information about the deal with the Ultras in the governing coalition. “The instruction is that governments dedicate themselves to governing,” says another baron. “We strive to solve problems, not create them.”
Despite the growing tensions between Abascal and Feijóo, the five PP-Vox regional governments are deepening their alliance through the implementation of their first budget plans. In the coming weeks, according to autonomous sources, everyone will have approved the public bills without major problems, although in some places they had to give in more than elsewhere. In Murcia, for example, the government will reserve 100,000 euros in its 2024 budget for “the defense of the unity of the Spanish nation,” while it will cut direct subsidies to employers and unions by around 300,000 euros (25%).
The Balearic Islands are an exception to this good trend. The weakness of the government of the popular Marga Prohens, who is supported from outside Vox, was made clear this week when her outside partners blasted the budget. The extreme right canceled the accounts of three ministries this Thursday, causing a technical failure of the project. The Ultras are demanding the abolition of the 400,000 euros in grants for employers and unions and the inclusion of a 20 million euro item to implement their linguistic segregation plan in classrooms, which aims to separate students according to the language they speak
If it wants, Vox shows that it can make the PP give up, so that the popular remains vigilant about the development of its partner in the new phase. The barons hope for a ceasefire until the European elections scheduled for June 2024. Then come the curves. “The Europeans are the decisive point for them. That's why we're going to let Vox radicalize three or four months in advance in order to survive,” calculates another president who has them as allies and who doesn't rule out the possibility of them taking over one of their joint governments. “Fundamentally, disarming governments would punish them. But a wounded lion might say: This is where I will break. They are quite unpredictable. And besides, testosterone is a bad advisor.”
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