“If she had known that this would be the result, María Guardiola would not have brought forward the elections.” The reflection, from a PP baron, summarizes the feeling in sectors of the party that saddlebags were not needed for this trip. The Extremaduran president and PP candidate pressed the electoral button with the aim of loosening ties with Vox, which had prevented her from approving the Budget and which has four essential votes for her to govern. , has set off alarms among the PP barons who are being examined in this electoral cycle. “Vox was underestimated,” admits a popular president, who believes that, in addition, they have to take note that Guardiola “was wrong with a flat and low-profile campaign.”
The problem with Guardiola’s result, who achieved a creditable 43% of the votes in a historic fiefdom of the left, is the “poor management of expectations,” some PP leaders understand. Guardiola was four short of the absolute majority and was left in the hands of a very large Vox, which doubled its seats (11). It wasn’t what was expected. While the PP has stayed in the low range of the result predicted by the polls, with Vox the opposite has happened, and Abascal’s party has surpassed the highest range of the polls. “The Extremaduran PP said that it was going for an absolute majority, but had they lost their minds? And on top of that, they are running a sleepy campaign in elections that are held in the middle of Christmas, on December 21!”, a territorial leader lights up.
Guardiola’s campaign, with a low profile except for the controversy of the alleged punching for the theft of a hundred votes in a Post Office, receives a lot of criticism in the PP. The PP candidate gave very few interviews, did not attend the TVE electoral debate and had full days without an agenda in the final stretch, with the aim of not making mistakes. “When you go with the handbrake on, the engine seizes,” questions another territorial leader. “Even more so,” adds a popular advisor, “when you have such a strong competitor on the right.”
In the PP, Guardiola’s personal clash with the leader of Vox is also criticized, whom he called “sexist” during the campaign and with whom he will now have to make an agreement. “We cannot win Vox for ideological reasons, but for management,” reflects a baron in reference to Guardiola’s feminist commitment, little followed in the PP. “You can’t blame Vox voters either, because they tell you that you’re going to find out.”
The question that now runs through the rest of the territories that go to the polls – Aragón, on February 8; Castilla y León, in March; and Andalusia, in June – is how to face the strong growth of Vox that Extremadura has portrayed. The barons have already learned that they have to go out and give their all. It is more difficult to find the key to put an end to Vox. The president of Andalusia, Juanma Moreno Bonilla, admitted yesterday that he is “concerned” by the rise of Vox and acknowledged that “it is very difficult to have an absolute majority in any territory.” “Vox will only begin to decline when they enter governments and assume responsibilities,” reflected Moreno Bonilla, who believes that then “their policies will be dismantled, which are often not viable.”
The reflection of the Andalusian president is a paradox that is now heard in the PP. After the stage in which the popular people suffered to try to prevent Vox from entering their autonomous governments – although they did not succeed and formed five coalition executives, which Abascal ended up breaking unilaterally -, some leaders believe that now the PP would be interested in the opposite. That is, Vox would re-enter its autonomous governments and wear out power, as ends up happening to all populist parties.
“The problem is that the person who should carry out this strategy is the one who least wants to,” says a top leader in relation to Guardiola, the regional president who has confronted Vox the most. No one in the PP is very clear about what the acting Extremaduran president is going to do to be sworn in, although the crisis in the PSOE – with the resignation of its candidate, Miguel Ángel Gallardo, due to the collapse of the socialists to their historic low with 18 deputies – could make things easier for her. The former Extremaduran president Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra has asked the PSOE to facilitate Guardiola’s investiture with an abstention.
Génova maintains, on the other hand, that “he does not trust the PSOE” to ask it to abstain and that he hopes that Vox will lower the price of its support because only its abstention is needed and not an affirmative vote. “Leaving me the car is not the same as giving it to me,” exemplify sources from the PP leadership. The popular leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo,
The popular ones believe that Vox will not ask to enter the Government of its candidate, but they distrust all of Abascal’s movements. For example, ask for the presidency of the Parliament of Extremadura, since that would allow Vox to control the timing of the investiture and place it right in the middle of the campaign for the next elections in Aragon. “Vox has had a notable rise that we respect,” point out sources from the national leadership, “but the PP also asks for respect from its electorate.”
