AAlberto Núñez Feijóo is used to something different from his native Galicia. Four times he got the absolute majority in regional elections for the conservative People’s Party (PP). The 61-year-old opposition leader missed that in the Spanish parliamentary elections, but he can still be satisfied with his result. After all, his party has become the strongest force in Spain.
Since April 2022, the former Galician regional president has been chairman of the PP. While the conservatives under his predecessor Pablo Casado had had their worst election results and the leadership had been torn apart in trench warfare, under Feijóo not only calm returned: A winning streak began – albeit with a downside.
In Castile-Léon, the PP won regional elections in 2022. In order to govern, however, she had to form her first coalition with Vox. An absolute majority followed in Andalusia in June, followed by absolute majorities in Madrid and the Rioja region last May after triumphing in local and regional elections. In Valencia and Extremadura, as well as in more than a hundred town halls, the PP governs with the right-wing populist Vox party, which tolerates the PP in the Balearic Islands.
However, Feijóo, who was born in a Galician village in 1961, did not open the door for the right-wing populists. In his homeland in the far north-west of Spain, Vox has yet to bring a single MP into parliament. Feijóo wants to win back the Spanish center for the PP and govern Spain without Vox with changing majorities. But that will be difficult with 136 seats in Parliament.
Moderate and pragmatic
He had made a name for himself in Galicia as a quiet, moderate and pragmatic conservative, as a manager who wants to keep everything under control – but not shrill like his predecessor Casado and not populist like the PP regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso in Madrid. When he was young, he voted for the Socialist Felipe González, as he openly admits.
At first, Feijóo was reluctant to move from tranquil Santiago de Compostela to the shark tank of national politics. In 2018, the PP Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy – also from Galicia – was ousted from power by a vote of no confidence. The PP fell into a deep crisis and Feijóo decided there was nothing for him to win back then in Madrid. At the beginning of 2022, after 13 years as Galician head of government, he was asked a second time. With 98.3 percent, the PP elected him as their new chairman.
Feijóo wants to turn the PP back into a popular party in which former Vox voters feel just as much at home as former Socialist voters, for whom Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has gone too far because of his collaboration with separatists and radical feminists. He initially offered Sanchez bipartisan “state pacts,” but soon the election campaign turned into a campaign of annihilation against “sanchism.”
Feijóo accuses his opponent of being a notorious liar. He himself admits “inaccuracies” when he told untruths about pension adjustments by the PP and hacker attacks on Sánchez. When asked about his friendship with a Galician drug smuggler in the 1990s, he withdraws from the fact that there was no internet back then in order to know more about it.
The PP leader passed his baptism of fire in Spanish politics two weeks ago when he surprisingly emerged victorious from the television duel with Sánchez. In just a few months, Feijóo has become tougher and more experienced. Nothing seemed to stop the father of a six-year-old son on his way to the Moncloa Palace, where the Spanish head of government resides. But it’s probably not enough. Feijóo won 47 additional mandates for the PP. But even with Vox, it wouldn’t be enough for its own government. On the balcony of the Madrid headquarters, he was hailed as a hero for a bitter victory that could result in the political deadlock he intended to prevent.
