During the harsh debate with Pedro Sánchez this Wednesday, Alberto Núñez Feijóo recognized his new role in front of locals and strangers for the first time. “It is an enormous responsibility,” he said, “to lead the opposition to a government that has perpetrated the greatest attack on the rule of law in recent democracy.” The phrase implied two important ideas. On the one hand, the president of the PP has already assumed his role, that of the leadership of the opposition, a place in which many in the party say he does not feel comfortable because most of his political life has been dedicated to govern. And, on the other hand, he believes that he does it at an exceptional moment. Feijóo is preparing to face the next stage of resistance until a new opportunity to challenge Sánchez for power appears. The popular leader reflects on his new team and his opposition style while he tries to harness the fury that runs through the right against the new progressive Government, trying to prevent it from being overtaken.
Feijóo pleased the PP in the investiture debate with a very harsh speech against Sánchez, in which he accused him of committing a “fraud” and an “exercise of corruption” by coming to power by agreeing to an amnesty law that he denied before the elections. The music of his intervention suggested that Sánchez’s government is an illegitimate government because it was born from a deception, but regarding the lyrics the leader of the PP ended up recognizing that the socialist leader has been invested with “a legitimate parliamentary majority”, in an exercise of normality. institutional that put its foot on the wall in the face of the most exalted speeches of the extreme right and its own party. The leader of the PP will play this double game, but whether he chooses one side or the other will depend in part on what profiles accompany him in the new stage. The Galician politician does not give a word, which worries the party, which believes that changes are urgent.
―You don’t know Feijóo. He doesn’t even know the collar of his shirt.
The phrase is from one of his closest collaborators, accustomed to the maximum discretion with which the leader of the PP handles information about his appointments. The changes are going to be profound, they say in Feijóo’s direct environment, because the media projection of half a dozen until now unknown faces will be sought and because Cuca Gamarra is going to lose one of his two positions, the general secretary and the spokesperson. congressional. But sources close to the leader point out that, in the face of the organic revolution that he considered a few weeks ago, when he asked for information on how to appoint a new general secretary of the party who did not appear on the list of members elected in the last congress, now “everything indicates “that Gamarra will retain the position of number two, while he will lose his spokesperson in Parliament.
Feijóo has ruled out the organic remodeling of scope that would imply appointing a new general secretary because to do so he had to use a “shortcut of the statutes”, and the “orthodox” thing to do is wait for the next congress to change the number two organic, they point to their environment. This implies, then, that Gamarra, by retaining the general secretary, will continue sitting next to Feijóo in the Parliament seat, although the leader appoints a new parliamentary spokesperson, and also that he will ask the vice presidents of the Government in the control sessions. So the new spokesperson, they maintain in Feijóo’s team, does not need to have so much a “media profile”, but rather someone is needed “with organizational capacity to manage the parliamentary group.”
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Several members of the steering committee point to the deputy secretary of Social Policies, Carmen Fúnez, deputy for Ciudad Real, who has been in the PP all her life for that position. “Fúnez knows the party because she comes from New Generations, she is a woman and she knows how to be firm. The important political debates will be carried out by Feijóo, she compensates him socially,” says a leader of the hard core, who considers that “there is no internal environment for a change of general secretary because the team has done well, although it has not been possible to govern.” , and the message, otherwise, would be that it was not done well.” “We won the elections,” claims this leader. “We didn’t see the failure of the polls, but it wasn’t just Cuca, it’s just that no one saw it.” Different members of the management committee insist on the idea that Feijóo is not going to revolutionize his leadership because that would be like disavowing them. “They are going to be minimal adjustments because this team has won the elections,” defends another important leader.
Nobody knows, however, Feijóo’s plans, which gives contradictory signals about what style of opposition he is looking for. This week he brought to the fore his Deputy Secretary of Organization, Miguel Tellado, a tough profile, to say that Sánchez “should leave Spain in the trunk of a car”, in reference to how Carles Puigdemont fled to Waterloo. And also to Esteban González Pons – his court advisor, who has been away from the spotlight for months – who has defended on Twitter that Sánchez is “the Viktor Orbán of the south”, in reference to the ultra-conservative Prime Minister of Hungary confronted by the European Union for its illiberal drift. And he added to that tweet by writing “Help Spain.”
Feijóo himself always moves in an impossible balance of “firmness in moderation,” they say in the PP, which in reality is more of a permanent game on the precipice pushed by the atmosphere of fury on the right. Anger spreads outside and inside his party. Outside, the extreme right agitates protests in front of the PSOE headquarters on Ferraz Street that have led to violence, with scenes of burning containers and confrontations with the police and Nazi and dictatorship symbols. Meanwhile, it pressures the PP to surrender to an anti-system opposition in an environment in which fifty retired Francoist soldiers have asked the Army for a coup d’état.
Inside, Feijóo also has to deal with voices such as that of the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who became the protagonist of Sánchez’s investiture when she was captured by the Congress cameras calling the socialist leader a “son of a bitch.” ” from the guest gallery when he mentioned his internal war with Pablo Casado. Far from retracting, Ayuso vindicated those words with the game that she wanted to say “I like fruit.” And “I like fruit” has become a viral slogan on the right to express the animosity they profess towards Pedro Sánchez.
Feijóo has to play in that field, after having tried until the end to come to power, as the PNV has shown this week by revealing that the popular people offered them to occupy the Ministry of Industry in exchange for their support, information that the PP denies. The leader’s team believes that he has good cards for the new game. “In the end this situation is not so bad. It would have been a nightmare to govern with the support of the PNV and Vox, he would have become the first president who failed to pass a single law, and now the rejection generated by the amnesty law makes it easy for him. The proof, they emphasize, is that tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets again this Saturday against the grace measure.
At the moment, no one disputes Feijóo’s leadership, although everyone in the opposition knows that the review is permanent. He will also have to be able to hold up in the resistance. Just in case, his friend Mariano Rajoy came out to give him his support one day after the election of the new socialist president: “Alberto Núñez Feijóo, as we saw last Wednesday, is the person most prepared, intellectually, politically and morally for tear down that wall of sectarianism that some insist on building.”
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