Alberto Núñez Feijóo has been breathing easy since Sunday. Poor results in the Galician elections did not threaten his position as president of the Popular Party, but it would have opened unbearable tension within the party that could have led to a new remodeling of the leadership of his party to protect himself more from the "noise" of Madrid. A shouting that threatens him at any mistake or slip and that conspired against him after the statements of the party leadership when defending, in the middle of the campaign and at a lunch with journalists, a possible pardon for former president Carles Puigdemont. In a matter of a few days he has gone from being a villain to becoming the hero who has catapulted Alfonso Rueda to the absolute majority in the Xunta. Because even his own people had demanded that he leave aside the electoral events in the face of the erratic strategy that, privately, they claimed that his leader was carrying out with the independence movement.
The victory of the PP has caught the Government with a changed pace, which had generated expectations of an electoral turnaround that in the end have not been met. The hopes that the Popular Party held in July of reaching the Moncloa have ended up passing over the Socialists who have left five seats along the way. The PP has had something in its favor and has known how to strengthen leadership in the communities. The same ones that Pedro Sánchez now remembers, urging his people to settle in the territory, to explore it and to break ground in the face of regional weight loss.
When expectations are so high, it is more difficult to manage failure and the Government is reluctant to accept it. They repeat that “Feijóo has not won anything” and that he continues in the opposition and they in Moncloa. They do themselves a disservice if they don't know how to detect that they have Feijóo for a while. They are not facing a Pablo Casado and with the Galicians he has reaffirmed himself within the party and has silenced the voices that had called for his head in the face of any sign of moderation or centrality.
After Sunday Feijóo has two paths: toughen his speech and contribute to the polarization in which Spanish politics is, caressing the theses of Vox or recover the speech with which he presented himself in April 2022 when he was elected president. In front of the party's militancy and cadres, he conspired to avoid the “bloc politics that – he said – prevents two parties from being able to speak.” “I don't understand it,” he said then and offered a helping hand to the PSOE to reach State pacts, but these great agreements have not arrived.
The renewal of the Judiciary could be the beginning. The two meetings in Brussels have ended in stalemate, but it is urgent to address Europe's claims, which urged months ago to first appoint new judges and then reform the election system. Feijoo has a great opportunity to appear as a statesman. Let's see if he takes advantage of it.
