Alejandro Fernández commends himself to Núñez Feijóo

Saved by the bell, Alejandro Fernández has decided to take advantage of the extra ball that the fall of the previous leadership of the PP, which had sentenced him, meant for him, to try to sew up the shreds of the party in Catalonia and reach the municipal elections of 2023 with electorally presentable clothing.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
29 May 2022 Sunday 21:54
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Alejandro Fernández commends himself to Núñez Feijóo

Saved by the bell, Alejandro Fernández has decided to take advantage of the extra ball that the fall of the previous leadership of the PP, which had sentenced him, meant for him, to try to sew up the shreds of the party in Catalonia and reach the municipal elections of 2023 with electorally presentable clothing.

After the tensions experienced in the last year, as a result of the poor results in the regional elections, the president of the Catalan PP sees the path clear until the autumn regional congress, in which he hopes to renew his leadership.

Today nobody seems to dispute power and even those who had been promoted by Pablo Casado and Teodoro García Egea in their insomniac struggle to gain absolute control of the party are now opting for the utmost prudence.

The arrival of Alberto Núñez Feijóo to the leadership of the PP has acted as a balm, at least from the outside, for the popular Catalans, who face with renewed enthusiasm, according to some and others, the challenge of rebuilding territorially to contribute to the Galician settle in Moncloa.

From Genoa, at the moment, there are no guidelines of any kind, according to sources from the national leadership, and they act with "total respect" for the regional executives, with whom the new strongmen of the party, Elías Bendodo and Miguel Tellado, they have begun to meet in a first contact. They will arrive in Catalonia in the next few days.

"They will sit down and talk, nothing will be imposed," so the regional leaders' room for maneuver to define their strategies and teams will be greater than during the theodocracy that Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo described in her book.

In that climate of relative serenity, increased by the secrecy that characterizes, according to the sources consulted, Feijóo when making decisions, the popular Catalans will resolve the main unknowns. In the first place, that of the candidate for mayor of Barcelona, ​​which will be cleared in the fall, although it is assumed that Josep Bou will not be in the equation.

The next step will be to prepare the lists for Congress. And here the hare could jump if Alejandro Fernández, praised last Tuesday by MEP Esteban González Pons as one of the best parliamentarians in Spain, decides to move to Madrid with a ministry on the horizon.

The statutes do not establish that the president of the party must necessarily be the candidate for the presidency of the Generalitat, so that possibility is not ruled out, although it would lead to an unprecedented and certainly unlikely bicephaly. In that case, the foreseeable thing would be for the leader of the Catalan PP to negotiate his replacement with Feijóo, in whose executive he has seated people of his utmost confidence.

The next appointment on the calendar is the European elections, in 2024. If she does not decide to leave Brussels to try to be a prophet in her land, Dolors Montserrat, a regular in the pools to lead the party, could repeat as a candidate for the European Parliament, where he is a spokesperson for the popular group.

And already in 2025, if there is no electoral advance, something completely unpredictable, the cycle would close with new regional elections. Then, and if all the previous conditions are met, Alejandro Fernández would try – with the favorable wind of a Feijóo that in the best of cases would be in Moncloa – reverse the negative drift and, this time, turn the polls around. , which in Catalonia are still in the abyss, which has led Xavier García Albiol to hide the initials of the PP in his platform to recover the mayor of Badalona.

Perhaps in that future, what Fernández proposed in 2021 and failed to achieve despite showing off in the debates could become a reality: grow at the expense of Ciudadanos with a campaign based on the economy and away from the identity effervescence of the procés and highlight its seriousness in the face of far-right nonsense to stop Vox.

For the story to have a happy ending, the president of the Catalan PP hopes that Feijóo, who has been a regional leader and knows the plurality of the country, does not succumb to Madrid's inveterate interventionist temptation.