González and Feijóo shared a weekend at the former president's farm in Extremadura

Until now, it had not been disclosed. In November 2021, Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Eva Cárdenas, his partner and mother of his only child, spent the night and spent almost 48 hours in the Extremadura home of Felipe González and his wife, Mar García Vaquero.. The couple owns a farm of several dozen hectares located in the Sierra de Guadalupe (Cáceres), where they built a house where González and his wife spent a good part of the pandemic.. It is the favorite place of the Sevillian politician and where he receives numerous visits, both institutional and from friends and family.. From there he works and travels frequently to fulfill his schedule.

The former President of the Government and former Secretary General of the PSOE invited the then President of the Xunta de Galicia during the celebration of the La Toja-Vínculo Atlántico Forum, in which both were two of the 40 speakers who took part in the debates and in which up to a hundred personalities from the world of economics, politics and the university participated, including former President Mariano Rajoy. The third edition of this forum, attended by PP and PSOE politicians, was inaugurated by the King and closed by the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, and the Portuguese Prime Minister, António Costa.

Trip to “dry off”

Alberto Núñez Feijóo told the former president his intention to move to the south of Spain to “dry off”, at which point González invited him to come to his house in Cáceres and spend the night.. The meeting was cordial and both interlocutors reviewed the political, social and economic news of the moment.. The current president of the PP has never hidden his sympathy for Felipe González. In April of last year, he confessed that he had voted for him in 1982, “clearly and out of conviction, and he would do it again”.

The context of the meeting was relevant for several reasons.. The first: Núñez Feijóo had achieved his fourth absolute majority the previous year (July 12, 2020), relegating the Galician PSOE to third position with only 14 seats, behind the BNG. And because in the previous month —October 2021—, the PP had held a convention in Valencia in which Pablo Casado's leadership crisis was opened. It so happened that, in the month of June of that year, Felipe González and Alberto Núñez Feijóo recorded a podcast on, among other topics, partial pardons for those convicted of sedition and embezzlement as a result of the events of September and October. of 2017 in Catalonia. (El Confidencial of June 3 of that year).

Three months after presiding over the PP

Less than three months after this visit by Feijóo to González, the internal struggle between Casado and Ayuso ended. On February 18, the former president of the PP attacked Isabel Díaz Ayuso on Cadena COPE —he accused her of corruption— and had to resign from the presidency of the organization two weeks later, on March 1, 2022, with the inescapable expectation that, at the extraordinary congress in April, Núñez Feijóo would succeed him. What came by acclamation. The significance of this meeting is twofold: due to the format —invitation to the private home of the former president in Cáceres— and for the moment —when an authentic pilgrimage of PP cadres to Santiago de Compostela was taking place since the summer of that year. Núñez Feijóo took the step and led the party—.

The sources consulted do not know that, subsequently, González and Feijóo have held other meetings, although they did have a couple of telephone conversations. The former president is extremely careful and avoids gestures or pronouncements that could cause division or controversy in the party, especially after observing very virulent reactions against him from the environment of the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez. It is no secret to anyone that, in the 2017 primaries, González supported the candidacy of Susana Díaz, although without explicitly stating her preference. He went so far as to affirm that “I do not support Susana Díaz because it would annoy her”, words pronounced at a lunch-discussion in Seville in November 2016.

González and Guerra remake their relationship

On the other hand, the former President of the Government has restored the broken relationship with his former Vice President Alfonso Guerra. Reputable sources reveal that the former PSOE general secretary, after many years of being incommunicado with his great collaborator in the party and in the Government, Alfonso Guerra, had lunch with him in the company of Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra, President of the Junta de Extremadura between 1983 and 2007, one of the leaders with the most weight in Spanish socialism during the González mandates and today aligned, like Alfonso Guerra, in the most critical sector of the organization to Pedro's pact policies Sánchez during the XIV legislature.