Alberto Núñez Feijóo did not miss the annual event with the transposition to Galicia of the Davos Forum, an event organized on an island of O Grove (Pontevedra) by the Hotusa group under the name Foro La Toja. In a speech on the validity of democratic values, the PP leader weaved ideas on international politics, polarization in Europe, young people’s access to housing and leaders who “want to control all the counterweights of power” because ‘they are themselves. are “afraid of free citizens”, in an allusion halfway between Pedro Sánchez and Nicolás Maduro. In his speech, he drew parallels between the current situation and the Cold War and compared himself to former US President John F. Kennedy and “Ich bin ein Berliner” – I am a Berliner – who ‘he said in 1963. western part of Berlin. In front of Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo González – whom he called “president-elect” – he declared: “I am Venezuelan.”
And not just him. According to him, everyone present – from former President Mariano Rajoy to representatives of the business community to Economy Minister Carlos Body – are also Venezuelans. “Any people who fight to have the freedom that we [los españoles] “We appreciate, he deserves to be considered one of us,” he reasoned, just after accusing, without quoting, Sánchez of what he considers a “systematic erosion of the division of powers, the personal use of state mechanisms or the attempt to intimidate the media Spanish politics, he insisted, is “plunged into a drift which is the worst in the last 45 years”, in which it is. perceives that “the personal interest of a single man”, namely Pedro Sánchez, prevails in decisions: There is no legislation, there are no budgets, there is no other horizon than day to day” The “only fuel” is the “polarization that we are trying to impose in a non-polarized Spanish society,” he continued.
His speech previously mentioned that, 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, “more than one political leader now says that building walls between ideas and parties is their fundamental goal.” The response to this recovery of the concept of the wall lies, according to the leader of the PP, in the appearance of “leaderships which only feed on polarization”. This, according to him, is “artificial”, as a “tool to take power”. For Feijóo, an example is that, despite the fact that in the 2023 general elections, “94% of Spaniards voted for non-independence parties”, these formations “actually decide a good part of Spanish politics”.
Feijóo explained his vision of the reasons for political polarization in Spain, but also his proposed solution, which is fundamentally housing policy, at a time when the difficulties of access, both through purchase and rental, attract attention. This issue, however, was not one of his priorities during his 13 years at the head of the Xunta de Galicia.
The PP leader’s interpretation of the dangers that threaten democracy is that the Spaniards of his generation – “I am what we call today a boomerand there are disadvantages that I will not go into detail”, he confessed – they embraced democracy as “the end point of dictatorship and a history of convulsions” and with a “component Young people are, however, “more exposed to democratic uprooting” due to the lack of historical references and the few “reasons for enthusiasm” in the present.
In response to “the inability to offer hope”, young people are moving towards “obsessive forms of polarization” on social networks and responding to the “siren songs of anti-system voices”, analyzed Feijóo. His response was to emphasize the housing plan that his party will present, which boils down to promoting a new construction boom, providing aid for the purchase of apartments and for owners who wish to rent them, and to continue the illegal occupation. He stopped on this last point: “The criminalization of private property is a serious error: we must prosecute those who commit crimes, not those who comply with them. »
The problem boils down to a simple question, according to Feijóo: “There is no access to housing if there is no housing. » This is, he underlined, an “emergency” to which public administrations must respond jointly around a table with “experts, banks, financial entities and all the actors concerned by the sector”. If the problem has not been resolved until now, he says, it is because of “electoral selfishness”.
