The PP resists a migration pact with the Government with Vox’s pressure on Feijóo increasing

Two months later, the Popular Party returns this Thursday to the negotiating table with the central government and those of the Canary Islands and Ceuta for the reform of the immigration law, but it does so with few expectations about the possibility of an agreement and only because it is a four-way match. The reality is that nothing has changed and, for the PP, the pact is still far away.

They maintain that the Government must assume the document that Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Fernando Clavijo, Canary Islands president, signed in September, and put as a red line that the European Union be “involved” by accepting a system for the relocation of unaccompanied migrant minors in other countries. Union countries and asking for help from Frontex (the European Border and Coast Guard Agency) for border control.

That is to say, the popular ones are willing to reach an agreement with the Government on immigration matters, even with the pressure from Vox in crescendo, as long as they can extract from the Minister of Territorial Policy, Angel Victor Torresa hardening of borders, in line with the model of the Italian ultra Giorgia Meloni defended by the PP. They want to change the entire immigration policy and not only what relates to the relocation of unaccompanied minors, that is, article 35 of the immigration law.

In this sense, Torres defended this Wednesday that the meeting that will take place in the next few hours is “a new opportunity” and that he will “reach out again” to the PP. The minister and former president of the Canary Islands assures that the Government has been “responding” to all the requests of Miguel Tellado, interlocutor on the popular side, and that, in addition, there is “talk about admitting for processing a bill” to which amendments and new requests can be made in the parliamentary process. But in the PP they maintain that the negotiating framework is the document that Feijóo and Clavijo signed and that they will not move from there.

The pressure from Vox is great and, furthermore, Tellado also does not want to sit at the same negotiating table as Torres and have the extreme right accuse him of “whitewashing” the minister, pointed out by Víctor de Aldama in his voluntary statement before the National Court. For this reason, the PP has vetoed the photographs at the work meeting that will take place this Thursday at the headquarters of the Canary Islands government in Madrid. They want her to go unnoticed, but she won’t. What’s more, it has had consequences even before it occurred.

Vox puts pressure on the PP

For the extreme right, migration is its great workhorse. In July, after a regular result in the European elections, Santiago Abascal announced that Vox would leave all the autonomous governments in which it governed with the PP to join the opposition. The decision was made by the leadership of the ultra party as a result of Feijóo pushing all his regional presidents to support the agreed relocation of 347 unaccompanied migrant minors. A figure agreed upon in 2022 and that did not correspond to the current emergency situation in the Canary Islands. Vox had a long-term strategy, which it maintains.

And for this reason this Wednesday, just one day before Tellado meets with Torres and the governments of the Canary Islands and Ceuta to resume talks, those of Abascal have announced that they are breaking off budget negotiations in all the autonomies.

The threat is not trivial because the PP has repeated on numerous occasions that a government without public accounts cannot move forward, in reference to the central Executive, and their regions would be prey to their own strategy. For the moment, Feijóo has put his foot on the wall: “The PP is going to continue defending its principles and its convictions, without submitting to blackmail of any kind. Neither from one side nor the other.”