The Galician electoral campaign does not escape the shadow of the Catalan issue, now updated with the legal and political mess surrounding the Amnesty law. José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero went to A Coruña to defend, in an electoral act of the socialist candidate, José Ramón Gómez Besterio, the initiative of Pedro Sánchez.
The former president reproached the Popular Party for trivializing the memory of terrorism. He lamented that "light is the memory when the pain is past. This terrorism that we suffered together, the terrorism of the bombs, of the assassination, that terrorism is already behind and that happened under my government. I demand that the social consensus on what it meant to leave him behind is not broken."
The controversy over the Amnesty law hovers over the Galician campaign, as could be seen in Monday night's debate on Galician Television, in which the PP candidate, Alfonso Rueda, exhibited the Catalan agenda to give the reply to his opponents on the set.
Yesterday, Rueda defended the absolute majority of the PP in Galicia against the "esvalot", a term with which the PP tries to present the alternative majority that could take over from it at the polls on February 18. A coalition, he says, that only aspires to perpetuate Sánchez.
The televised debate - which already seems clear that it will be the only one that will have his presence in the electoral campaign - continued to make people talk yesterday.
The opinions that the PP candidate did not go as well as they expected are fairly consistent. Yesterday Rueda suggested that the four leaders of the left that he faced in a friendly territory, Televisió Galicia, had agreed on their strategy.
In any case, the truth is that the debate aroused interest. It had an audience of 18%, three points more than the previous regional campaigns of 2016 and 2020, in which the PP won.
The coming days will see what impact it has had among the electorate, especially that 20% of Galicians who have not yet decided who they will vote for on Sunday the 18th.
Rueda's main opponent, the BNG candidate, Ana Pontón - who, according to some polls, would have won this televised round - defended her railway project yesterday and received the support of a veteran of Galician nationalism, Anxo Quintana, who was leader of the Galician Nationalist Bloc, a party he left in one of the successive fractures that the political current has suffered.
Quintana already supported the candidacy of Pontón in 2020, in the process of rebuilding the Bloc, which in this third attempt to get the presidency of the Xunta, also has another historical figure of Galician nationalism, José Manuel Beiras, and from the formation that he himself promoted, Anova, framed four years ago in Galicia in Comú, where Podemos was also present. Pontón has managed to expand the training base and this can bring him new income in this campaign.
