The PP launches the attack against Pontón due to the threat of setback

The Galician campaign reaches its halfway point with the polls showing an increasingly tight battle. The rise of the BNG in the face of the declining trend of the PP has caused a change in Alfonso Rueda's electoral strategy. His main antagonist in these elections is no longer Pedro Sánchez. Since the popular candidate's long-suffering debate on Galician Television, in which he fought several direct confrontations with the nationalist over the use of Galician in school and the status of Galicia in Spain, the popular candidates have focused and intensified the attacks against Ana Pontón . They accuse her of weaving a hidden plan to demand the independence of the community. Meanwhile, they avoid the face to face between her and Rueda that Cadena SER and the three-way debate on TVE have offered them. “How is it possible that a candidate does not want to debate?” Pontón asks. “I don't know if he doesn't want to or if they don't let him.”

Alberto Núñez Feijóo maintains that if the nationalist becomes president of the Xunta, she will put the community in a “drift of rupture” like Catalonia because she wants a “self-determination referendum.” The leader of the PP has disfigured the BNG's alliance in Europe with Bildu and ERC and has once again taken out ETA: “A month ago the BNG went to demonstrate in favor of ETA prisoners in the Basque Country. Now he hides and does not want to talk about this matter.”

Meanwhile, candidate Rueda has positioned himself at forward. It starts with a comfortable record, the 42 deputies that Feijóo achieved in 2020, but the CIS already opens the possibility that 18-F, its substitute in the electoral poster, will fall below the 38 seats it needs to save the absolute majority. “We are going to talk about 38 and everything that comes older we will celebrate,” he acknowledged in an interview on EsRadio. The acting president of the Xunta believes that he has guaranteed that minimum number of seats right now, but he has warned his electorate that “at any time” in this final stretch of the campaign “circumstances can change.”

The popular ones fear a demobilization of their voters after chaining four absolute majorities since 2009 and also a flight of votes towards Vox and Democracia Ourensana (DO). Feijóo sees a “very serious danger” of overconfidence in his voters. All the polls leave the far right out of the Galician Parliament, but they do give Gonzalo Pérez Jácome's party options. Rueda hopes that this populist and ultra-liberal formation “will not serve, far from it, to condition the government of the Xunta.” Remaining in the hands of the mayor of Ourense would be diabolical for the popular people after what happened with the pact they sealed with him in 2019. That alliance, which made the indomitable leader of DO a councilor in exchange for his support to keep the popular Manuel Baltar as president of the Provincial Council, ended up jumping into the air. Another agreement with Jácome to save the Xunta would be a hard ordeal for the PP, especially since he has kept him denounced in court for serious accusations of corruption.

The nationalists see the PP's attacks as a symptom that the dispute for the Presidency of the Xunta is tight. “If anyone has doubts, they should watch TVG,” Pontón stated this Friday. “They even invent news to attack us. That means that the campaign is going very well.” These words were spoken this Friday by the BNG candidate at a packed event in Santiago of great value for Galician nationalism. At his side, the leaders of Anova, Xosé Manuel Beiras and Martiño Noriega, who left the BNG with a slam of the door 12 years ago. Noriega appreciates an unusual mobilization for change, a “snowball effect.” “This is a country in which David often beats Goliath,” he proclaimed.

Beiras believes that the BNG is reaping the fruits of a “gradual mutation” in Galicia that dates back to the eighties, a “constant process of decolonization” that “did not always translate into the vote.” Each ballot, he has warned, “is important” to stop Rueda, who “is not a democrat and is a coward.” Pontón has called not to stay at home on 18-F, comparing the PP campaign “with its financing”: “The campaign in A is that of the TVG, and B is the one in which they want to convince the nonconformists to throw the towel”. The former president of Uruguay, Pepe Mujica, and the Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel have asked for the vote for Pontón.

The PSOE, which appeals to the comeback of 23-J while the demoscopy maintains its support stagnant, has deployed the Government in Galicia with Pedro Sánchez at the head. Four ministers took part in events in the community this Friday. The president has chosen A Coruña to celebrate the Day of Women and Girls in Science surrounded by schoolchildren and together with the astronaut Sara García, a few hours after being expelled by the Central Electoral Board for an act in January at the factory of Navantia in Ferrol in which it announced a new workload for these shipyards.

The Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, has highlighted the socialist candidate for the Xunta, José Ramón Gómez Besteiro, who is a “capable”, “competent” man and with “influence in Madrid”: “Call the ministers, call me me and calls the others. We get on the phone and listen to him. And we not only listen to you, but we serve you.” The former minister and leader of the PSC, Salvador Illa, has appealed from Vigo to urban voters who usually abandon the PSdeG in regional elections. He has put Abel Caballero as a paradigm of the management of his party in Galicia, an “example of politics understood as a public service”, which is “focused on solving problems and not on confrontation.” Yolanda Díaz has also arrived in the Vigo region along with Sumar's candidate, Marta Lois. The vice president of the Government calls to repeat the surprise of 23-J: “We have the second opportunity to democratically put an end to the PP.”

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