The open crisis in the PP begins to close. The popular ones have begun to give the first stitches to a wound that will still have time to heal. But, at least, there is temporary provision for the channels to return to normal. Or, rather, to the ‘new normal’. Predictably, April 2 and 3 An extraordinary national congress will be held to invest Alberto Núñez Feijóo as president. The president of the Xunta will take over from Paul Married and he will take control of the game, but he will have to learn to live with Isabel Diaz Ayuso as president of the Madrid PP and with a tremendous pull in the polls. The differences between the two are obvious.
At first glance and asking almost any citizen who is somewhat attentive to current politics, the first thing that differentiates Feijóo and Ayuso is the speech. The forms of the president of the Xunta -not the substance- are calm. Calm down. He is little friend of the great fuss and screams. If he has to say something, even forceful, he says it with slow voice. This has nothing to do with his ideological toughness, being a fairly conservative baron.
In the antipodes is Ayuso, showered in generating controversy, raising a stir with great phrases and airing a speech easily confused with that of Vox. “When they call you a fascist, you are on the good side“, the Madrid president came to say about a year ago, a few months before an election in which she won by opposing freedom -a fundamental right- with communism -a political current-. “If you don’t want to meet your ex-partner, you won’t do it in Madrid“, he said then. Feijóo does not have a repertoire as extensive as Ayuso’s.
Vox unites and disunites the two conservative leaders. Both have been able to stop the party from Santiago Abascal -in the last elections in Madrid only one deputy grew and in Galicia they have not entered parliament-, but the way they are treated is not the same. And this, with the ultras holding the key to governability in Castilla y León, becomes a key issue.
In Madrid, Ayuso has always been inclined to agree with the extreme right-wing party. She was sworn in as president with the votes of Vox and negotiated the Madrid General Budgets with them. After the elections in Castilla y León, she has participated in signing an alliance there. Feijóo, until now, has not had to deal with the ultras, but he has warned that it is “impossible“Agree with those who want to kick out your party.
John Charles I, although more than 7,500 kilometers from Madrid, it also stands between Feijóo and Ayuso. Both want the emeritus king to return to Spain, but there are subtle differences. The Madrid president does not stop praising her to the former monarch, “one of the people who has done the most for the figure Spain“. The leader came to say at the end of December that Juan Carlos I “he has been paying for his current problems with the Treasury or with the Justice with apologies and an abdication“. Feijóo is not far behind in praising the king emeritus, although he has made it clear that “decisions on a personal level or in his private life can be discussed.” In addition, he has been in favor of regularizing his situation with the Treasury.
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The differences between the two leaders are also observed in the management of the pandemic. Ayuso has raised the flag of supposed freedom, referring to the few restrictions that the Government has been imposing. Confronting at all times with Pedro Sanchez, the National Executive was forced to apply the state of alarm in the Community of Madrid due to the high number of cases. The recipe of the Madrid president, with a collapsed public health system, has been to trust in the “individual responsibility“.
Feijóo has been more conservative. There is still a limit of diners per table, both indoors and outdoors, and until this weekend it is necessary for hoteliers to request the vaccination passport to access your premises. The ‘covid passport’ has never entered Ayuso’s plans.
The ‘no’ to everything that the Government of PSOE and United We Can of Ayuso and the current leadership of the party does and says also contrasts with Feijóo’s position. Contrary to the PP’s dominant position of rejecting the new labor reform, the president of the Xunta pointed out that it did not imply a repeal of the regulations approved by Mariano Rajoy in 2012 and that it only entails “modifications of some paragraphs”. He opted to give a ‘yes’ to the text. He helped, for his part, called it “unnecessary.”