Alberto Núñez Feijóo gathered the PP leadership and its regional barons after the European elections last June, won by his party. His open speech was, as usual, triumphalist, and he barely referred to his direct competitors in the right-wing electorate. But behind closed doors, the PP leader took out his cell phone and told his audience that with that instrument alone, someone had obtained 800,000 votes. He was referring to Alvise Pérez. The PP leader ordered his followers to monitor the situation. “We have to improve the networks,” he said. And that’s what they did.
As elDiario.es has learned from popular sources, the party has been following Alvise Pérez’s activity on social networks since June. The objective: to understand how a former advisor to the former leader of Ciudadanos, Toni Cantó, became the sixth force in terms of votes in a state call with the electoral group “The party is finished.”
Through a mix of hoaxes and ultra messages on a Telegram channel, and the promise of drawing his MEP salary, Salf managed to break into the European Parliament with three seats. He beat Podemos in the elections and was on the verge of beating Sumar. Alvise won half of the votes for Vox, who is being singled out at the PP’s national headquarters on Genova Street in Madrid as the real victim of the new party’s emergence.
After the June elections, the PP has worked, publicly and privately, to downplay the Alvise phenomenon. “Our goal with these voters, but also with those of the PSOE, Vox and other political parties, is to convince them that the option for change in Spain is the one that the PP represents,” national spokesman Borja Sémper said in a press conference on June 10.
Since the June elections, Salf has consolidated in the polls. The CEI gave him 1.5% in the general elections of the same month. In July, Simple Lógica for elDiario.es put him at 3.1% of the vote.
Hardening the message
“We understand that there are several million Spaniards who are fed up and tired,” he added, pointing to his right: “In any case, it is a part of the political council that does not concern us. An electoral war between Vox and El Partido is over. We continue to grow in the center.
But a few weeks later, the PP surprised by announcing that Feijóo would participate in WorldCast, a podcast by a businessman and Holocaust denier influencer who supports ultraliberal messages. Exactly the type of content that abounds in the channels that have sprung up around Alvise and his group.
The experiment did not go particularly well. Not bad. Feijóo was Feijóo and the PP, at least for now, has not insisted on this path to try to reach younger voters, far from traditional forms of communication, among which television continues to dominate as an opinion generator.
What the PP has done is to harden its discourse a lot. The process began months ago. But since July it has been more urgent. Vox and Alvise have championed the attack on migrants, especially on minors who arrive alone on the Spanish coast, and Feijóo’s party is not willing to let a new three-way competition on the right deprive them of any possibility of governing, as has already happened to Pablo Casado with Vox and Ciudadanos.
But it is on social networks that this turnaround has been most visible. The PP has a Telegram channel in which it publishes videos of interventions by its leaders. But also part of its own production that generally also circulates on Twitter.
The last one of this type dates from September 1st and is presented under a slogan that does not hide its intentions: “You will work tomorrow, Pedro Sánchez to continue enjoying yourself. You pay.”
On September 6, they published another one along the same lines, entitled “LO-DO: Sanchista Journal,” a parody of the television news of the Franco dictatorship.
If in Genoa it was thought that the dissolution of the party founded by Albert Rivera and co-governance with Santiago Abascal that would meekly bring the conservative voter back into the fold, does not seem to be happening, according to public opinion data. The PP will have to work hard to attract him. A discursive dichotomy that Casado has already faced, with very little success.
