The Galician electoral campaign does not escape the shadow of the Catalan issue, now updated with the political legal imbroglio around the Amnesty law. José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero went to Coruña to defend, at an electoral event for the socialist candidate, José Ramón Gómez Bestio, the initiative of Pedro Sánchez.
The former president reproached the Popular Party for trivializing the memory of terrorism. He lamented how “light the memory is when the pain is past. This terrorism that we suffered together, the terrorism of bombs, of murder, that terrorism is left behind and that occurred under my Government. I demand that the social consensus about what it was like to leave it behind is not broken.”
The controversy over the Amnesty law hangs over the Galician campaign as could be seen in the debate on Monday night on Galician Television where the PP candidate, Alfonso Rueda, pulled the Catalan agenda to respond to his opponents in the dish.
Rueda, yesterday defended the absolute majority of the PP in Galicia against the "hustle", a term with which the PP tries to present the alternative majority that could take over at the polls on February 18. A coalition, he maintains, that only seeks to perpetuate Sánchez.
The television debate – which already seems clear that it will be the only one that will have its presence in the electoral campaign – continued to cause people to talk yesterday.
The opinions that the PP candidate did not do as well as expected are quite coincident. Yesterday Rueda suggested that the four leaders of the left that he faced in a friendly territory, Galician Television, had agreed on his 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.
In the coming days we will see what impact it has had among the electorate, especially that twenty percent of Galicians who have not yet decided who they are going to vote for on Sunday the 18th.
Rueda's main opponent, the BNG candidate, Ana Pontón – who, according to some polls, would have won this television round – put her foot down and yesterday dedicated herself to explaining her railway policy in which she proposes creating her own train service like Basque or Catalan.
In the afternoon his candidacy received the support of a veteran of Galician nationalism, Anxo Quintana, who was leader of the Galician Nationalist Bloc, a party that he abandoned in one of the successive fractures that the political current has suffered.
Quintana already supported Pontón's candidacy in 2020, in the process of rebuilding the Bloc, which in this, his third attempt to achieve the presidency of the Xunta, also has another historical member of Galician nationalism, José Manuel Beiras and the formation which he himself promoted, Anova framed four years ago in Galicia en Común where Podemos was also present. Pontón has worked hard to expand the base of his training and this can bring him new revenues in this campaign.
