Either Vox negotiates very well or the PP negotiates very badly. In the end, the Murcian president, the only one who seemed willing to resist, ended up giving in, and the far-right party has managed to enter all the autonomous governments in which the numbers gave it some possibility. As of this week, there are five autonomous communities whose governments Vox is a part of, and its territorial power now reaches more than eleven million people, almost a quarter of the Spanish population.
Let's do a brief recount. In Murcia, the PP only needed two Vox seats for the absolute majority, two seats that have ended up becoming councils with vice-presidency included. On the other hand, the twenty-one regional deputies of the PP will only be responsible for the remaining eight: those councils have been very cheap for one, very expensive for the other. The agreement is not very different from the one reached in Aragon, in which a small number of seats also translated into two ministries and a vice presidency in the hands of Vox. In Castilla y León and the Valencian Community, with a somewhat greater representation, Vox achieved control of three ministries. Only the president of Extremadura, a woman with a liberal disposition whom the national leadership of her party was quick to calm down, has managed to stop the far-right formation a bit, granting it only one council position in a government of ten. The conclusion is simple: Vox is overrepresented in four of those five autonomous governments.
The truth is that it is not understood why, after the sustained stake, the Murcian president has decided to sheathe it at the last moment. Three months dizzying the partridge to end up accepting Vox's initial demands? These negotiations are like the car races in Rebel Without a Cause, in which the winner was the one who jumped out of the vehicle just before it plunged into a ravine. Fernando López Miras has given up and is now licking his wounds in the mud on the road. That price, that of humiliating his government partner, has also been charged by others. I am no one to make predictions about elections that are not even going to materialize, but it is known that in electoral repetitions voters tend to concentrate around the big parties and punish the culprit of the repetition, which in this case would be Vox . If López Miras hadn't gotten the hang of it, the one who would have ended up falling off the cliff would have been Vox.
New elections in Murcia would have also served as a thermometer of the variations in the conservative camp. There are reasons to think that Vox is a party in decomposition. In the last general elections, it lost nineteen deputies and more than six hundred thousand votes. Among those volatilized seats are five of the six he had in Castilla y León, which means that his performance in the autonomous government, of which he has been a part for more than a year, is far from being close to passing. That one of its founders, Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, has abandoned ship without giving too many explanations does not speak very well of the state of health of the organization. It could be that Vox would disappear in a very short time, like Ciudadanos has disappeared, which just four years ago (four years!) touched the sky by obtaining no less than fifty-seven deputies. A bad result for Vox in a repeat election in Murcia could have put the finishing touch on it.
But it seems that, in reality, the one who has gotten into the funk is Feijóo, who, like the protagonist of Ninette and a man from Murcia, refuses to leave his four walls. The thing about Feijóo and Vox is what the old song says: neither with you nor without you. With Vox he is not enough to govern and without Vox, which is how the PP has always governed, even less so. Of course, unlike the PSOE, which has always had parties with parliamentary representation on its left, the PP has been the eternal owner and lord of the right wing. Only when the voters who have left Vox return to the fold will he be in a position to govern. The question is why it is taking so long to stand up to its true rival, which after all is a cutting from the same stem.
