The president of the PP and candidate for the Presidency of the Government, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, will center the campaign for the general elections of next November 29 on exploiting his profile as a manager. The “popular” leadership wants to keep drawing in disenchanted Socialists with the management of Pedro Sánchez and, at the same time, try to contain the momentum of Vox, which appears to be on the rise in all the polls.
"I come to offer management, rigor, and experience," Feijóo has repeated in the last two weeks, since the Urda rail accident (Toledo). That will be the axis he will reinforce in the campaign, accompanied by the promise of giving Spaniards an Executive that "governs and manages so that Spain can start working again," according to sources at Europa Press “popular” sources.
During the 15 official days of the campaign, Feijóo will call for a "clear" and "strong" mandate to set the country back on the right track and address the "national reconstruction that the country needs." The PP’s objective is to reach a majority broad enough to be able to govern on its own and, if that were not possible, to minimize its dependence on Vox, so that Santiago Abascal’s party has less weight in the parliamentary tally.
Although the published polls agree in giving the PP-Vox bloc a comfortable absolute majority, it is Abascal’s party that surges the most in almost all the polls, which even suggest it could double its current 33 seats.
In this context, Feijóo’s team has set a goal of surpassing the 137 deputies achieved in the general elections of July 2023 and focusing on the pool of Socialist votes. Feijóo himself acknowledged a week ago that, despite the "flight" of "indignant" people toward Vox, he believes that the PP "has gone from less to more" and is attracting abstentionists, new electors, and social-democratic voters.
In the first half of October, the “popular” party already had internal trackings that reflected a transfer of votes from the PSOE to the PP, which would have gone from 5.9% to 7.8%. In the view of the party’s top leadership, that trend would have been consolidated after the Urda accident, say the same sources.
Deployment of the PP across the entire territory with its barons
Ahead of the general elections, the PP is planning a full deployment of the organization, with several overlapping campaigns. In addition to Feijóo’s tour, there will be a campaign of the executive committee, 17 autonomous-region campaigns with the regional presidents, and 52 provincial ones. The goal is to cover the entire map and reach the places where the candidate cannot be there physically.
Feijóo has also involved his territorial “barons” in the campaign, and some will participate in events outside their communities, such as the president of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, or the Andalusian Juanma Moreno. Active presence in different territories by the former prime ministers José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy will be added to this.
“Faced with an increasingly alone and weak Sánchez, Feijóo will be backed and strong as never before. We go out to win and to govern, we go out for everything and we go looking for all the support we can,” Miguel Tellado, the PP’s campaign director, said a few days ago.
Feijóo’s immediate agenda: Madrid, Santiago and Santander
The PP has already moved forward part of the central events of the campaign. After the official opening this Thursday night in Badalona, together with the mayor and the top candidate for the Congress seat for Barcelona, Xavier García Albiol, Feijóo will travel on Sunday to Madrid for a major event with the regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, and young people from the party.
On Saturday, he will stop in Santiago de Compostela, accompanied by the president of the Xunta, Alfonso Rueda, and on Sunday he will travel to Santander, where he will headline a rally with the president of Cantabria, María José Sáenz de Buruaga, the candidate for Congress, Isabel Urrutia, and the mayor of the city and top candidate for the Senate, Gema Igual.
On Monday, he is scheduled to attend in the morning in Lleida and in the afternoon hold a rally in Pamplona. The day after, on Tuesday, Feijóo will travel to Bilbao in the morning and to La Rioja in the afternoon, according to sources from the PP.
With the rest of the schedule still to be finalized —including the date of the electoral debates that the Academia de Televisión will organize—, the PP has already announced another major rally for Saturday the 21st, in the middle of the campaign, which will be held in the city’s bullring, a symbolic place for the “popular” party over the past decades and a symbol of their periods of absolute majorities.