A month. This is how long the vaunted “social turn” of the PP has lasted after the return of summer. Announced in September with great fanfare by the spokespersons of Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s party, with great media impact, the internal storm caused by the fiasco in the law that will allow Spanish prisoners to accumulate sentences already served in the EU has forced the PP to redirect their strategy to return to a tough end-of-cycle speech away from the sectoral proposals that, they said, were going to dominate their agenda after a year of legislature. The indictment of the attorney general for a complaint from Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner and the almost certain investigation against José Luis Ábalos within the framework of the ‘Koldo case’ have paved that path.
Last summer, the PP came to the conclusion that it is most likely that Pedro Sánchez will manage to remain at the head of the Government. Despite the enormous difficulties in securing the parliamentary majority that invested him for a third term, Feijóo’s strategists are almost certain that there will be a General Budget for 2025 and, therefore, a legislature.
Feijóo acted until then under the premise that Sánchez would quickly succumb due to the impossibility of controlling Junts. Especially since the courts, led by the Supreme Court, have limited the application of the amnesty and have left out, for the moment, Carles Puigdemont.
Despite the obvious anger of the Junts leader, who is on his way to completing his seventh year on the run from Spanish justice in Belgium, the reality is that the Government has not lost any vital vote. The withdrawal of the spending ceiling from the agenda at the end of September had the objective of opening a broad negotiation with the Catalan independentists to tie support to the Budgets.
This was verbalized this week by one of the main leaders of the PP, Elías Bendodo. In a closed-door meeting with provincial party officials, he ruled out a motion of censure (for which he needs the unlikely support of parties as distant as Vox and Junts or the PNV) and took the public accounts for 2025 as almost certain. The PP does not He hides that he has a punctual dialogue with Junts.
The rejection of the motion of censure was preceded by several ‘noes’. Some are fundamental from an arithmetic point of view, like that of the PNV. Feijóo has insisted since 2022 on attracting the ‘jeltzales’ to the classic hinge role with each other that right-wing Basque nationalism had in the past. But the signals coming from Euskadi are clear: the PNV shares many governments with the PSOE, including the regional one. And his relations with the PP are terrible. The PNV spokesperson, Aitor Esteban, went so far as to publicly call his PP counterpart, Miguel Tellado, “clumsy.”
Another of the most significant ‘noes’ was that of Isabel Díaz Ayuso. The president of Madrid, who usually marks the ideological and discursive path of the PP, took a position this week against voting with Junts. He did it just after the president of the Catalan party, Laura Borrás, opened the door to joining with the PP and even with Vox to oust Sánchez. Those of Santiago Abascal joined in, but Borrás herself denied herself shortly after.
Priority: change the narrative
Tellado is precisely the greatest exponent of the hard wing of the national leadership of the PP. Feijóo’s right-hand man for decades, first in Galicia and now in Madrid, his role as top leader of the parliamentary group has been called into question not only by the fiasco of the law that allows prisoners to accumulate sentences, but also by the reaction to the news and the instrumentalization of ETA victims.
It took more than a week for the PP spokesperson to apologize for brandishing a poster with images of ETA victims in the plenary session of Congress. And he did it on Federico Jiménez Losantos’ radio with a formula that expressed half-hearted regret: “I have removed that photo from my social networks out of respect for the victims of terrorism who may have felt offended. But I do not withdraw the intention of my actions, which is to confront the PSOE with its own moral misery.” In case there were any doubts, he settled: “The PSOE is a party of miserable people, of miserable people.”
The alleged error in the processing of the law is behind the counter-turn of the PP’s argument, which has returned it to the previous position of harshness from which Feijóo wanted to get out. The opposition had become the center of much criticism, especially among its own. And the story had to be changed.
It began a week ago, with the extraordinary convening of a steering committee on a Sunday only to announce that the next day they were going to register a complaint against the PSOE. The basis: an anonymous statement from an alleged businessman who said in an interview in ‘The Objective’ that he had taken “bags of money” to the socialist headquarters of Ferraz.
The length of the complaint will be minimal, since jurisprudence vetoes the admission for processing of complaints that are based solely on press clippings. And in the PP they not only know it, but they don’t care because their objective was to make headlines, as an authorized spokesperson for the leadership told journalists last Wednesday in the halls of Congress. That is, change the media story.
The PP has not hesitated to use the Senate again for its own interests and, if it already did so with the amnesty, it has done so again now. The president of the Upper House, Pedro Rollán, vetoed the law with a vote in the Plenary despite the fact that the Constitution requires that all or partial amendments be presented, something that the PP did not do during the weeks that the law was in the Senate.
The strategy does not seem like it will be short. This same Friday, Feijóo warned from Berlin: “This has only just begun, the president is at the point of no return.” “The threat that most worries the Government is the corruption that stalks it,” he added. And the PP is willing to squeeze it to the maximum.
Damnified: the social “turn”
In his interview with the ultra communicator, Tellado recovered a recent phrase from the former president of the Government and one of the main operators of the hardest wing of the Spanish right, José María Aznar. Whoever managed to reassemble the opposition to Felipe González in the 90s said a phrase that has remained engraved during the processing of the amnesty law: “He who can do, let him do.”
And, in the words of the PP parliamentary spokesperson, that is what they are doing. The strategy is precisely reminiscent of the one launched by the political, economic and media right three decades ago to overthrow the Government of Felipe González. Someone who was then in the engine room of the operation, the former director of Abc and then of La Razón, Luis María Ansón, declared years later that they put “the stability of the State” at risk.
But that strategy was accompanied by a harsh economic crisis that dragged down the socialist government. Something that, today, seems far from being repeated.
But the PP believed it had found how to attack the Sánchez Government through other means. Last week tens of thousands of people took to the streets to ask for intervention in the rental market and the need to move towards a system that allows them to reconcile personal life and work has been established in the younger generations.
The PP theorized the need to champion both issues, or at least to enter the debate and put forward concrete proposals. To solve the problem of access to housing, the right resorted to its recipes: lower taxes and liberalize land. To improve the working conditions of Spaniards, three quarters of the same: tax cuts and privatizing early childhood education in its initial phases, among other issues.
Not all the measures proposed were liked by everyone and Isabel Díaz Ayuso once again made it clear that she does not accept ideological deviations, not even those that propose 10-hour days to reduce the work week to four days, whenever companies want.
But that phase has already passed. The escalation of the ‘Koldo case’ to ‘Ábalos case’ and ‘PSOE case’, the delegitimization of the attorney general from the first day or the investigation against the president’s wife were already there when the PP sardonically told journalists that They were going to “get fed up with sectoralism.” That is, concrete proposals in specific matters.
Necessity has made the PP return to the point it was at before the summer holidays: hyperbole. This same Sunday, the Denaes Foundation, Vox’s parapet, has called for a demonstration in Madrid against the Government. The PP has already announced that it will support it and will send a representation of its leadership. Despite the breakup of the autonomous governments and the criticism that Feijóo and Abascal routinely level at each other, the unity of action between the two continues.
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