New turn of the wheel. Alberto Núñez Feijóo wants to once again embody the moderate character with the reputation of a good manager who arrived in Madrid in April 2022. Two and a half years later, after having flirted with xenophobic populism by linking migration and delinquency, the PP wants to recover the flags and move away from the far right. And, in the heat of the polls, the first initiative will be the proposed conciliation law that the People’s Party will present this Tuesday to Congress, even if not everyone within the party agrees.
“The opposition not only opposes the government, but also offers an alternative. And this is what we want to do throughout this period of particularly intense sessions. This is how its national spokesperson, Borja Sémper, explained this Monday the new “social turning point” of the PP. The leader assured that the strategy would continue throughout the session, which ends with the Christmas holidays.
The PP therefore wants to stop confronting the government on the territorial question. Or, at least, not make criticism of amnesty the axis of their opposition. The PP of Pablo Casado had already tried to make forgiveness for the leaders of the process the axis of its speech against Pedro Sánchez, and it failed. Like later Feijóo with this same strategy.
The idea now is to show something more than a frontal rejection of the policy of “reconciliation” that Sánchez has promoted in Catalonia due to his parliamentary weakness. “Our alternative to this government, subject to the independence movement, is reflected in the proposals we make to citizens,” Sémper declared on Monday. That is to say, not only is the dependence on Junts, ERC or EH Bildu criticized, but laws of a supposedly “social” nature are proposed to demonstrate the legislative paralysis of the government that those of Feijóo denounce .
Polls indicate that amnesty is not an issue that moves votes. The inauguration as president of the Generalitat of the socialist Salvador Illa also indicates a de-escalation of the problem and, consequently, its disappearance from the main media and gatherings. This is how Sémper explained it this Monday: “The Spaniards have had enough of partisan interests and a government that is a bad government. “They want solutions to their problems.”
The change in the PP is more discursive than content. The policies they propose in terms of housing, conciliation or immigration have not changed, but Sémper himself has moved from the need to justify that his leader directly involves people coming from outside Spain to crime, to regret the shipwrecks in the Atlantic of canoes trying to reach the Canary Islands.
Criticism of the hard sector also of policies
The PP’s revolt towards moderation coincides with a move away from Vox caused by the ultra party itself, which chose this summer to break up the autonomous governments it shared with that of Feijóo. Santiago Abascal’s men also want to distance themselves from the right, hoping to ride the anti-European immigration wave which has allowed the ultras to triumph at different levels in France, Austria and Germany.
The PP has for months justified its alliance with Vox and maintains its support for coalition municipal governments. But Abascal’s break allowed Feijóo’s men to loosen their ties with their allies and mark their distance.
Sémper himself did it last week on the TVE show 59 seconds. When asked if he preferred Abascal or Pedro Sánchez, the PP spokesperson responded after a few seconds of hesitation: “With neither.”
The response came via Twitter from the former president of the Community of Madrid, Esperanza Aguirre. “That’s the way we do it,” the TODAY talk show host said. But also from the inside. The leader of the PP in Catalonia, Alejandro Fernández, responded to his own party’s national spokesperson: “I am for Reagan and Thatcher, neither for Trump nor for Abascal. But I prefer them a thousand times over to Sánchez and Yolanda. “Zero doubt about that.”
This is not the only criticism leveled at the hard sector of the PP these days. Last week, Feijóo said his party could be in favor of implementing measures to reduce the number of days worked per year, and even opened the door to supporting reduced working hours. Of course, outside the law and only within the framework of negotiations between the company and the workers.
The government of the Community of Madrid has declared itself “ipso facto” to mark its position. The spokesperson for the Executive chaired by Isabel Díaz Ayuso declared in a press conference that he did not know the position of the national leadership of the PP, but that the Ayuso government was “totally opposed” to any measure of this type.
Precisely, another tweet from Esperanza Aguirre anticipated the position of the Madrid PP. Faced with some headlines that anticipated the strategic change in Feijóo’s leadership, the former leader declared: “Error.”
