feijoo confirmed this week that he has not come to insult Sánchez (he already said it the first day), but to win it. What’s more, he doesn’t want a crusade against the PSOE -as Pablo Casado, Isabel Ayuso and Cayetana Alvárez de Toledo dreamed of, scrambled but fought over-, but to make it clear that the PP is a government party (as in Galicia) and therefore able to reach agreements with the Government if you think it convenient.
It has not been an easy week. He has had to swallow the toad of the first PP-Vox regional government. He has endorsed it – he believes that it would be worse to resign from governing – but he wanted to make it clear, with his absence at the inauguration of Mañueco, that he does not like it, that he is not his model. And he has stated that I would prefer pacts with the PSOE to govern the most voted list. With the idea, of course, that after the next general elections, the PP will have more votes than the PSOE. Quite a few polls say so.
But the most voted list is complicated. The PP rejected it after the 2019 regional elections in Madrid, Castilla-León and Murcia; Pedro Sánchez does not want it (he prefers to leave the PP with the only trick of hugging Vox) and there is a further problem of governability. But for the moment, with the most voted list he lowers the mantra that his only possible resource is Vox. And in Castilla-León it was Sánchez who did not want to.
On the other hand, you want to turn the page Liberal fundamentalism of Casado’s PP -lacking a solvent economic head- and in which the shadowy guru was Daniel Lacalle, a witty neoliberal with no government experience. Now Feijóo has drawn up a first draft of an economic program that seeks to have more electoral appeal. propose to lower taxes -what the right always likes- but to the income brackets that earn less in order to compensate for the erosion of purchasing power due to inflation. It will have to be analyzed the IMF does not recommend it, but it may have a ‘hook’. And it is not the classic thing that the rich pay less so that they then invest more.
And it seems to Juan Bravo -not the community member of the 16th century, but the Andalusian Minister of Economy and deputy secretary of the PP- has helped him in the shadows Fatima Banez, Rajoy’s former Labor Minister, now very close to Antonio Garamendi. It was she who from the CEOE negotiated with the Government, CCOO and UGT the labor reform that Pablo Casado choked on and from which Pedro Sánchez only came out alive at the last minute and from a penalty.
Feijóo’s problem is Andalusia. All his efforts can blow up -or be very washed out- if after the next Andalusian advances, the PP has to give Vox entry into the San Telmo palace. So Moreno Bonilla hesitates, strips the daisy and still hasn’t decided on the election date.
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Andalusia will be his first moment of truth. A credible centre-right proposal is difficult to digest with two pacts in a row (Castilla-León and Andalusia) with Santiago Abascal. In some way something similar to Pedro Sánchez threatens him. That a center-left program that looks to Europe and trusts Macron loses steam with some partners who continually trip it up because they are still on the paleolithic left, the one in which capitalism is absolute evil.
Feijóo did not come to insult Sánchez. Less to help you. And Sánchez does not want to pave the way for the new leader of the right. But both can suffer the same indigestion: needing more radical parties to govern. Which, in the medium term, generates strong instability. Does it smell?