Natalia Puga Pontevedra
Pontevedra
Updated Saturday, February 3, 2024-18:46
18-F Galician elections: the first big test to gauge the strength of the blocks that fight on the political board
Politics The 376,000 Galicians who were not born in Galicia and can decide the Galician elections
Alberto Núñez Feijóo
and
Mariano Rajoy
are completely dedicated to the Galician campaign, in which they burst in with their own caravan to reach every corner of the community and ask for the vote for
Alfonso Rueda
's PP . As a starting signal, they went to what is now their "talisman" place, the bullring of Galicia, which they went to for the first time 15 years ago, in February 2009, in Feijóo's first campaign. The Bipartite - a coalition of PSOE and BNG - was then governing and, from the opposition, they filled the arena and then the elections. They repeated in the regional elections of 2012, 2016 and 2020, all with an absolute majority for the
popular ones
, and they wanted to return to "recharge their batteries" for this new campaign, convinced of a new victory: "We will win again and with more difference."
"Alfonso, in this place, one enters as a candidate and leaves as president of the Xunta, I tell you," Feijóo encouraged Rueda, his successor in the party and in the Xunta in what is his first campaign as a candidate. For his part, Rajoy, after remembering that he has been active in the party for more than 40 years, added: "This bullring brings back the best memories for me."
Rajoy dedicated one of his famous reflections to that bipartite. "They ruled here then. Sorry for saying that they ruled. Those that you remember were here then and, if you don't remember, it's the same because nobody misses anything." He recalled that, after those regional elections in which they debuted in these bullrings "they stopped governing, they are still waiting; and what they have left...". Then, the PP won and "that changed things a lot for Feijóo, for me, for the PP and also for Spain." Then five more times came in general and municipal elections and also Rajoy's victory. "Some say that it is a talisman for the PP and it is true," he said.
Feijóo focused his intervention in a Galician key, in which "Alfonso Rueda is the answer that Pedro Sánchez does not want to hear on February 18" and "Alfonso Rueda is the answer that nationalism does not want to hear on February 18", but he did not forget current state affairs and wanted to contrast Rueda's model with that of Sánchez in Spain, since "the Government of Spain is an embarrassment for Europe and that of Galicia is an example for Spain."
Feijóo assured that he was in this campaign for the "defense of the given word" and the "protection of the equality of all men and women in Spain" that the PP bursts into this campaign following the path of "responsibility, not breaking what we have always been" that he marked from his first majority in 2009 and defending the need to guarantee the Rueda Government so that "friction and fragmentation of others do not enter this land."