“The disaster in Mérida does not come from Extremadura, nor from Murcia, but from Genoa, which is sabotaging the negotiations”. Sources from the Vox leadership place the difficulties in forming a coalition government in Extremadura as part of a fight that is taking place within the right, and for which they blame the PP: “They want to kill Vox”.

This growing tension is related to the attempt of the popular to position themselves in the campaign away from those of Santiago Abascal. This is what they believe in Vox: “Feijóo will try to stage a break, and will say that he does not want to go hand in hand in any way”.

To a certain extent, the desire for Genoa responds to the need to counter the PSOE's discourse. Sánchez has framed the campaign as a fight between the best of Spain and a right-wing coalition that would lead Spain to a setback of years. If Feijóo transmitted the message that he is clearly far from Vox, he would leave Moncloa without his main asset. However, this purpose is difficult to fulfill, since the agreements in many town halls and in some communities underscore the reality of the national right and if the PP does not achieve a sufficient majority on 23-J, the coalition with Vox seems difficult to avoid..

The disappearance of the useful vote

Precisely for this reason, it is convenient to understand the other part of the electoral struggle, since the distribution of votes within the right is at stake. The desire of the PP is to capture the maximum number of votes from that ideological spectrum and, for this, it has to reduce the space of Vox. But making agreements now in all the town halls and the autonomous communities would convey to the voter the idea that voting for Vox would serve for the PP to govern; that is to say, the PP's recourse to the useful vote would disappear. And there is a substantial part of bordering voters, of those who can opt for one party or another depending on the circumstances, and if they believe that betting on Vox implies doing it for a less soft PP government, it is likely that they will give their confidence to the of Abascal.

The PP not only tries to avoid this possibility, but also aspires to have enough strength to govern alone. This is stated by Vox: “Genoa believes that it can have a majority that allows them to govern with specific pacts, for example with the PNV”. Feijóo's goal would be to get that number of deputies enough to not depend on Abascal's, and for that they need to reduce Abascal's space as much as possible. However, Vox sources insist that this movement goes beyond the purely electoral: “The approach, which is a permanent syndrome in Genoa, is to kill Vox. They see us as their main political enemy, because they think that we have to return to a situation in which PP finds itself with nothing to its right.”. Characters as disparate as Aznar, “who is putting a lot of pressure” and González Pons, but also the European People's Party, who would see an alliance between the two forces in Spain as bad, agree on this purpose..

the european fight

However, the European case is much more ambiguous than is given to understand, because there are two contradictory positions. On the one hand, there is the German position, that of the CDU leader, Friedrich Mertz, who has refused to make any alliance with the extreme right of the AfD, and, on the other, that of Manfred Weber, the president of the European People's Party. , more favorable to them. The growth of these forces in northern Europe, with an east where they are a regular and often dominant presence, and a south where they are the first force in Italy, second in France and third in Spain, has caused Weber to assess what a PP would mean European with all that wealth inside.

From Vox, they believe that this internal tension will settle soon, since “the European PP is in a fight and will have to leave”. Leaders like Giorgia Meloni will be instrumental in leading it to a new place. However, they believe that now this division in the European right-wing, “which is the same as that experienced in Spain, because the same thing happens almost everywhere”, can harm them, since there is pressure for PP and Vox not to sign a government alliance after the generals.

the double campaign

The future for Vox, from this perspective, is full of obstacles: “We expect them to attack us from everywhere, from the left-wing press to Federico Jiménez Losantos, because it is something in which there is consensus”. His position will not change: “We will continue our business. In the Balearic Islands, for example, we have a very interesting pre-agreement, with issues in which we show that we are useful”.

Ultimately, the tension between PP and Vox underscores how this campaign will have two focuses of interest. The fight between blocks, in which the right starts with an advantage, and the intra-block fight, to the extent that Feijóo and Abascal will try to steal votes, and the same will happen between Sánchez and Díaz. Most likely, as the campaign progresses, the fighting will become more intense..