Santiago de Compostela, May 17 (EFE).- On May 28, the main Galician parties -PPdeG, PSdeG and BNG- are at stake much more than the distribution of local power, they will be measuring their forces and leaders in a new scenario, without former president Alberto Núñez Feijóo, for the regional elections next year.
His successor at the head of the Xunta Presidency, Alfonso Rueda, makes his electoral debut as leader of the PPdeG, with the challenge of trying to recover the power lost in the cities and maintain the Ourense Provincial Council.
Opposite is the PSdeG -led by the candidate for mayor of As Pontes (A Coruña) and president of the Diputación de A Coruña, Valentín González Formoso- pending to preserve urban power and define his candidacy for the next regional elections, after reincorporation to the policy of José Ramón Gómez Besteiro, the new Government delegate in Galicia.
And the leader of the BNG, Ana Pontón, who has already announced that she is going all out and aspires to improve to reflect her second position in Galicia in the municipalities.
THE DATA
Although the PPdeG, which governs in the community, remains the party with the most votes at the municipal level, with 33.34% of the votes in 2019, some 150 mayoralties, the PSdeG follows a short distance behind with 32.7% (109 mayors) and the advantage of governing in three of the four provincial councils, and five of the seven cities, in some cases in coalition with the BNG (12.44%), which runs 28 municipalities.
Almost 2.3 million people will be able to vote in the 313 Galician town councils, of which only the seven cities have more than 60,000 inhabitants and concentrate more than a third of the total population of Galicia.
The 28M 161 parties present themselves, but only the PPdeG has candidacies in all the municipalities, while the Socialists have 305 and the BNG 265.
The candidacies of Podemos and Marea still have a role to play, together or separately, in some city councils, such as that of Vigo, where they compete in a coalition after having been the third force in 2019, or A Coruña, where they compete separately; and Ciudadanos aspires to retain representation in the city of Lugo.
EPICENTER IN OURENSE
The province of Ourense, the main granary of votes for the PPdeG, will have a special role, after having been the epicenter of a political earthquake in recent weeks, with two cases that have reached the judicial sphere of the mayor of the city, Gonzalo Pérez Jácome ( Democracia Ourensana), who had the support of the PP, and the president of this party in the province and in the Provincial Council, Manuel Baltar.
In addition, the city of Ourense, the third most populous in Galicia and the gateway for the AVE from Madrid, is the one with the most uncertain prognosis. Already after the previous 2019 elections, the third party with the most votes, that of Pérez Jácome, ended up governing, thanks to an agreement with the second, the PPdeG, in exchange for retaining the Provincial Council.
BASTIONS OF THE LEFT
The main city in Galicia in terms of population, Vigo, is the bastion in which the mayor and socialist candidate, Abel Caballero, hopes to be re-elected again by a majority.
In Pontevedra, the candidate for re-election for the BNG, Miguel Anxo Fernández Lores, mayor since 1999, hopes to achieve his seventh consecutive term in the city, where he governs in coalition with the PSdeG.
The socialist Inés Rey aspires to remain as mayor of A Coruña, after having Marea Atlántica as her preferred partner in this mandate, which is now running parallel to Por Coruña, the other option of the rupturist left supported by Yolanda Díaz and in the that his father, Suso Díaz, is closing the list.
“THAT DOESN’T BOTHER US”
The PPdeG seems to have some chance, according to the latest surveys, in the city of Ferrol, even with an absolute majority for José Manuel Rey, and Lugo, where the president of the provincial PP, Elena Candia, competes with the socialist mayor Lara Méndez.
In Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galicia, the candidacy of the popular Borja Verea could become the force with the most votes, ahead of the PSdeG, with the current mayor Xosé Sánchez Bugallo, although without an absolute majority to govern.
Aware of these narrow margins, the PPdeG has just launched a slogan for “Que non nos amolen” (Don’t bother us) aimed directly at criticizing the policies of the leftist parties.
This comes after the leader of the BNG, Ana Pontón, has criticized Rueda’s “mamporrero style”, which the general secretary of the PSdeG, Valentín González Formoso, accuses of being “in Babia” and touring Galicia as distracted in this campaign. .
Monica Sequeiro