Maria Lopez
Madrid, Jul 9 (EFE).- With four absolute majorities behind him in Galicia, Alberto Núñez Feijóo is convinced that he will be president of the Government of Spain and that he will be able to banish the ghost of Vox to manage alone, whatever they say polls.
Because Núñez Feijóo (Os Peares, Ourense, 1961) claims to be moderate and even boring, but he does not renounce the epic.
In his debut as a PP candidate for the general elections, he has adapted his first electoral motto -from “Chegou o momento” to Es el momento”- to surpass the polls, which in 2009 did not anticipate his first absolute majority and now question his goal of a “sufficient majority”.
A year ago he left the Xunta to go to the rescue of his party, two months ago he scored the victory of the regional and municipal elections and before 23J he asks that the Spaniards unite under the acronym of the PP to put a “boy born in a village” in La Moncloa.
He arrived at his office in Genoa by acclamation, as the messiah to whom all the popular ones were entrusted to close the crisis between Pablo Casado and Isabel Díaz Ayuso. And to give the necessary packaging to beat Pedro Sánchez. Four years were needed for Feijóo to catch that train, which he let pass in 2018, when everyone was waiting for him.
In Madrid, he has had to face the expectations that Galicia had aroused in national politics and a PSOE that has sought to dismantle his image as a manager, reformist and center, highlighting his mistakes and contradictions.
To make a dent in it, the Socialists have resorted to their greatest controversy, the photos of Feijóo with the drug trafficker Marcial Dorado on a boat, taken in the mid-90s, when his then friend was a tobacco smuggler, and released in 2013.
In the spotlight has also been his relationship with Vox. Because despite his criticism of populism and extremism from Galicia, it has been in his stage as leader that the PP has broken the taboo of putting Santiago Abascal’s party in the Government. First in Castilla y León and later in the Valencian Community and Extremadura.
The question is whether it will do so in the Council of Ministers. Feijóo says that he will try to avoid it, asks for the useful vote and recalls the absolute majorities of the PP in Andalusia or Madrid -with him at the controls-, the pacts with other parties or the role of the PSOE, which he asks the most voted to govern.
In his time as leader of the opposition, with a seat in the Senate, Feijóo has played a balancing game. He has recovered the relationship with Vox – he abstained in his motion of censure – and asks to come to an understanding with the PSOE, with which he has not reached any pact. Programmatically, he combines the endorsement of the abortion deadline law and the labor reform -both rejected by the PP- with the promise to repeal sanchismo.
In his eagerness to conquer the entire political spectrum, he has confessed that he voted for Felipe González, whose political change in 1982 he calls to emulate from the opposite camp.
At the head of the PP, Feijóo has accommodated the most moderate discourses, such as that of Juanma Moreno, and the most ideological, such as that of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, and has brought together the two souls of the party, José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy, in the same scenario.
And he has done it with an undisputed authority, heir to the one he achieved in Galicia, his own hard core, which has moved with him, and a tight control of information about his decisions. With him the barons have recovered their autonomy, without losing sight of their loyalty.
Feijóo also submits a trajectory of three decades of management to the polls, which is far from current politics, nourished by positions from the youth, since he did not join the PP until after he was 40.
With a law degree, Feijóo abandoned his dream of being a judge due to his father’s dismissal and competed in the upper body of Galician officials, where he rose at the hands of the popular José Manuel Romay Beccaría until he achieved a politically appointed technical position in Galician health. .
From there he made the leap to the Aznar Government, to direct the Insalud and the Post Office. He returned to Galicia with the Prestige crisis, due to the resignation of Manuel Fraga’s dauphin, Xosé Cuíña.
After being Infrastructure Minister and First Vice President, he succeeded Fraga at the head of the Galician PP in 2006. And with a tough opposition against the bipartisan PSdG and the BNG, he returned the PP to power.
To his first absolute majority, in 2009, he added another three, equaling his predecessor, Fraga, whom he could now surpass if he manages to get a Galician to govern Spain for the second time.
To achieve this, Feijóo has presented himself to the Spanish as someone who is “not perfect”, but “normal”. He has gone with his partner and his mother to the streets of his village, telling that what amuses him the most is playing with his six-year-old son, and confessed one of his pending subjects: he Does not know English.