Feijóo attacks Alvise Pérez’s party: “I am worried. Politics is not about that”

—First time in a medium of this type?

—Yes, I’m making my debut today. I did a podcast with Felipe González some time ago, but for a medium like yours with direct access to the Internet, this is the first.

—It sounds like a not-so-native podcast.

This is how the controversial one started influencer Pedro Buerbaum and the president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, in the audiovisual podcast Worldcast. It is a digital interview platform that gives space to characters who feed conspiracy theories, aimed at a young, ultra-predominantly male audience, and close to the postulates of Se Acabó La Fiesta (SALF). The conversation lasted around an hour in which the leader of the PP has analyzed national politics with messages in line with his argument, without slipping or leaving his framework. Although the leader of the popular party has launched slogans aimed at a young profile in line with the podcast, and has praised Buerbaum as an example of an entrepreneurial figure. “Congratulations, not all people your age [29 años] get what you are getting.”

But Feijóo has also analysed the party headed by Alvise Pérez with a clarity that he had not done before in public. “When there is a populist government, like the central government, this type of movement automatically occurs on social networks,” said the leader of the Popular Party. “This is the product of a populist government in Spain. And it worries me. It worries me because, in my opinion, politics is not that. Politics is about preparing, about training, about having knowledge, about having an interest in the management of public affairs, about loving your country and having a project for the common people. It is not just about voting against,” he stressed in the interview, recorded on Tuesday and broadcast live on YouTube on Thursday afternoon.

Feijóo has expressed his concern about SALF and has attacked Alvise Pérez’s party, which in the last European elections won three seats and more than 800,000 votes. “It is a protest vote. It has happened in other places in Europe. One thing is to vote with your guts and another is an alternative political project,” he said about the group of voters who aspire to run as a political party in the next general elections, which he considered does not have “prepared people” or “cadres” capable of managing public resources compared to a Popular Party that does have “a project and people to do it.” It is the first time that Feijóo has gone to a digital platform of this type, in which the 2030 Agenda, feminism and migrants are attacked, and taxes are completely disdained. And which Alvise Pérez usually goes to.

After Feijóo’s interview, the activist who heads SALF has challenged the president of the PP to a three-way debate with the leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal. “You criminalize me as much or more than you criminalize the left, why don’t you focus on Pedro Sánchez?”, he added in a video. During the podcast, Feijóo has focused a good part of his speech on launching darts against the action of the President of the Government. He has also directly accused the Executive of “a situation in which there are some gentlemen who do not believe in Spain and have governability”, in reference to the Catalan independentists and EH Bildu, as the reason for the rise of Alvise Pérez’s party. In the live chat of the interview, the comments of the users were mostly in support of SALF and against Feijóo and the Popular Party.

Almost a month ago, in the closed-door meeting held two days after the European elections with the barons at the party headquarters in Madrid, Feijóo expressed his concern about the greater degree of fragmentation that SALF represents and complained that he did not understand how, with much less budget for social networks than the PP, Alvise Pérez had accumulated such a large number of followers on these platforms. The team of the leader of the PP, who when he landed in Madrid began by attending Bertín Osborne’s programme, now sees in platforms such as Worldcast the opportunity to reach out to a young electorate of millions of followers who do not read the press or watch conventional television or listen to traditional radio, and will continue to evolve towards more actions aimed at “broadening” their spectrum.

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