Straight away from the call for general elections for July 23, the PP has placed a new motto on the lectern of the press room in Genoa, 13: “A Spain prepared”. It is a pre-campaign slogan, because today the road to the polls has officially begun, without a solution of continuity. and without anesthesia. Don't let the rhythm stop.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo has appeared to make a “statement”, in which he has shown his “satisfaction with the call for generals”. “Better as soon as possible”, he has settled, before remembering that he asked Pedro Sánchez to make the national elections coincide with the local and regional ones, “so as not to hold two elections in 54 days”. But, yes, he has alerted his supporters that they cannot be trusted: “We have only begun. Sanchismo has not yet been repealed.”
The president of the PP has made, how could it be otherwise, a very positive analysis of the performance of his party on 28-M. “Spain opened a political cycle yesterday, and I call on everyone to complete that political cycle that ends on July 23. The Spaniards have said enough, we have come this far”, Feijóo assured, before judging that “the path of renewal is already unstoppable”.
Asked -in the only turn he gave to the press- about the policy of pacts in the autonomies and cities where the PP needs Vox to add the majority, Feijóo has assured that the “fine analysis” will be done by the territorial organizations and not Genoa , where the general panorama will be addressed. As EL MUNDO announced exclusively, it will be the barons who will have the last word on the agreements: “It is up to them. We are going to be respectful of the powers of each one and with the reality of what emerges from the polls.”
Asked about his proposal for the most voted list to govern, he has assured that this offer “does not expire”. “If the PSOE accepts it, I am in a position to be able to talk about it and agree on it. It is in our democratic regeneration code, I am not going to change it,” he explained.. In the PP they believe that Sánchez will never accept a global pact “because his plan is to join his partners even if he comes second” in the generals.
Feijóo has revealed that no one from the PSOE has called him to congratulate him on the victory of the PP on 28-M, and has added that he has contacted Emiliano García-Page for having won in Castilla-La Mancha and that he will also do so with the Asturian Adrián Barbón and, where appropriate, with the Socialist from Navarre María Chivite.
Santiago Abascal has called Feijóo. “Yesterday we had informal contact with the Vox party, exchanging congratulations. Abascal and I have spoken and he has congratulated me on the results and I have told him that he had grown a lot”, detailed the Galician leader. “If someone else wants to congratulate us, I am at their disposal”, has challenged Sánchez.
For Feijóo, this lack of institutional courtesy shows that “another way of doing politics has begun to win, in substance and in forms”. “This is about a frivolous and fractured policy giving way to another responsible one and uniting society,” he added.
That is why he has asked for “a clear, incontestable and forceful majority, to start a new course as soon as possible”. And he has assured that “five years of the PSOE with Podemos Bildu and independentistas have been enough and are part of an exhausted model that must be finished forever”. “Neither the policies nor the social climate generated are what Spain wants,” he argued.
Finally, Feijóo has criticized the specific institutional moment in which the elections will be held, just at the beginning of a community responsibility: “In his tendency to strip everything that has surrounded his mandate of institutionality, neither the current presidency of the EU has been left out of that unfortunate way of understanding politics,” he added, since that presidency begins on July 1, on the very brink of the polls.
Faes: “It is a flight forward”
For its part, José María Aznar's foundation, Faes, has published an editorial in which it ensures that Sánchez's decision “may surprise, but not surprise”. In the opinion of the conservative think tank, “Sánchez wants to present as an act of coherence what is nothing but a flight forward, the prolongation of the state of denial in which Sánchez finds himself.”
For Aznar’s foundation, the advantage that the president of the Government wants to obtain is “purely tatist”. “It seeks to overshadow the resounding victory of the PP” and to stop “the internal fray in the PSOE that, for sure, was going to happen after the disaster of 28-M”. That is why Faes encourages the PSOE to “consider a future without Sánchez” in which his party “recovers its status as a true party of State.”