Alberto Núñez Feijóo moves better in the propositional field, from which he has the experience of his years as president of the Xunta, than in that of opposition leader who comes out to confront the Government on issues that may turn against him. For this reason, after a few days focused on everything that refers to the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary or the crime of sedition, the president of the PP tries to return to the economic debate, and also with new proposals that present a PP that has a project and can be an alternative government.
This strategy is what led him to overcome, shortly after being elected president of the PP, Pedro Sánchez, in the polls, and to gain a distance that the leader of the PSOE has only managed to reduce when identity issues have entered the debate. or institutional policy. And that is the strategy that Núñez Feijóo tries to recover in his public appearances, although there are elements that persecute him.
This Thursday, the president of the PP, who visited Guadalajara on his way through Spain to prepare for the municipal and regional elections in May, spoke on the street, before the media, and not a single reference to the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary, of which he wants to turn the page. On the contrary, he announced a new plan that the PP is preparing to send to the Government, it would be the fifth, this time aimed at mitigating the rise in interest rates and helping families who have the most difficulties in dealing with mortgages.
Although the plan is not finished, the president of the PP announced two concrete measures. The first, to recover the deduction for habitual residence in the IRPF that Pedro Sánchez eliminated when he came to the Government, a measure, he said, with which all families would have help to face the rise in mortgages.
The second would have a greater scope and would consist, he said, in the creation of a fund with contributions from the bank and the state, aimed at helping measured and low incomes to face mortgages in certain circumstances that he did not disclose and that he will remit to the government. "Two measures that would work - he said - and that would serve to maintain a minimum balance" in family economies, and would allow abounding in social justice.
Feijóo considers that "there is money to take these measures", because the Government already has an excess of collection over what is planned for 2022 of 28,000 million euros, which can be used, he insisted, to help families with measured and low incomes. For this reason, the president of the PP also insisted on his initial proposal to lower personal income tax for families earning less than 40,000 euros, to alleviate the consequences of the high inflation that Spain has and which he placed at 13% in two years. With this same argument, he asks the Government to lower the VAT on basic foodstuffs and to extend until the end of winter the VAT reduction on gas and electricity, which in principle the Government has adopted until the end of the year.
For Feijóo, these measures are about "being useful to the people" which is what he is in politics for. That is why he asked Sánchez "to help people." The president of the PP, however, is aware that he cannot withdraw from the political debate, or from the political skirmish, and for this reason he asked Sánchez "to help the people and not so much the condemned politicians", because the Spanish have to knowing that politicians "are equal before justice" and that not because they are politicians will they be forgiven for their crimes. He elaborated on this idea because he believes that the Spanish "do not understand that they are pardoned or that crimes are committed according to politicians."
The request is "to worry about the problems of the people and stop worrying about the damned." Not an explicit reference to the reduction of sentences for the crime of sedition, a word that Feijóo avoided saying.
Nor did Feijóo speak of the exhumation of the remains of General Queipo de Llano from the Macarena Basilica, which took place tonight in application of the Democratic Memory Law, but he did respond to a question on this matter that was put to him: "I I like to talk more about the living than about the dead, and I prefer to solve the problems of the living and leave the dead in peace. I'm not going to engage in politics with the dead."
Regarding the BBC documentary on the assault on the Melilla fence in June, the president of the PP asked the Government to clarify whether the images broadcast by British television are real, if he knew them and hid them, if he did not know them, or if he knew it and denied it". But he did not want to go further.
And regarding unemployment, he limited himself to saying that the unemployment figures do not reflect the reality of the labor market, although they did help him to say that the two communities where unemployment has fallen the most are Andalusia and Madrid, and in his opinion something will have to do with the economic and fiscal policy that is carried out by the popular governments of these two autonomies.
