Why is Galicia the only autonomy without the presence of Vox?... And the 'miracle' of Avión

Vicente Coll Avión (Orense)

Antonio Heredia (Photographs)

Plane (Orense)

Updated Tuesday, February 6, 2024-02:08

• 18-F The Galician PP after Feijóo: "Rueda is not a copy; he is more into drinking beers and Feijóo, into coffee"

• Matilde Elections, the rural portfolio that travels 105 kilometers every day due to dispersion

In

Avión

they have been breaking one of the great electoral clichés all their lives: in a town with more than half of the census abroad and linked "to the 99%" with emigration for a century, the right does not know what it is to have a bad day at the polls. The Popular Party sweeps with overwhelming percentages, unparalleled in Spain. But remember that in Avión they don't like clichés, and the pirouette of the exception can always get a little more complicated: this corner of vineyards between the Orense mountain ranges of Faro and Suído, with the vote for the PP and the rate of emigrants at stratospheric levels , is the mirror in which Vox looks at itself facing 18-F after having found its ray of hope here and achieving, against all odds, its only public position in Galicia on May 28.

Avión (Orense, 1,754 inhabitants) speaks with a thick Galician accent. But also Mexican, Uruguayan and Venezuelan. Its flag is that of an entire region forced to cross borders decades ago against hunger, poverty and lack of means, and its shield is crowned by a swallow, an emblematic bird of migration and queen of the Galician skies for a few months. . But in July and August the spice and the flowers revolutionize the

town

: dozens of Mexicans return to their origins to spend the summer and flood the place with color, gastronomy and music from overseas. Among them are several of the most important fortunes in Mexico, such as

Olegario Vázquez Raña

, who usually invites other magnates such as

Carlos Slim

or

Amancio Ortega

.

On this landscape, among the mansions with a heliport and the granaries of the 14th century, Vox has established its particular idyll with Galicia after breaking a curse that seemed to have no cure. Here, where the PP achieved 85.84% of the votes in the 2020 regional elections -

Alberto Núñez Feijóo

's ceiling that year -,

Abascal

's people achieved a local feat when they entered the City Council on March 28. Plane and register for the first time a public position in all of Galicia, the only region in which the Vox counter remained at zero. A political miracle in the place where the Virgin of Guadalupe protects as many houses as the local saints.

The councilor who broke the ice is

Lilian Cerdeira

, who declines to address the media. Yes, the mayor of the municipality does, the

popular

Antonio Montero

, who despite the double anniversary for the PP and Vox in this town includes his neighbors in moderation. Hence, he expects Avión to once again register "majority" support for

Alfonso Rueda

, even among those who in May opted for the three-letter green ballot: "As much as they feel identified with the list that represented Vox in the municipal governments, they will continue to have center-right ideas.

José

, a 78-year-old neighbor, conveys something similar

: «Here they are all from the PP. And they openly criticize him, but when it comes to voting... They support him again. Everything painted blue, as

Quique

summarizes in the bar.

Antonio Montero, from the Popular Party, mayor of Avión (Orense).

What may seem like a personal consideration is a phenomenon that explains the little pull of Vox in Galicia, as once happened to Ciudadanos, as opposed to a broad PP that encompasses all the nuances of the right. "Vox does not have room to grow there," considers

Javier Martín Merchán

, professor at the Department of International Relations at the Universidad Pontificia Comillas, who focuses on the binomial that explains Vox's limited push in this region: "Little demand" for the capitalization of the right-wing vote by the PP and "bad offer" with regard to Vox, which is barely rooted in the territory, has practically no organic structure in the region and faces the campaign with a national discourse with little specificity regarding Galicia.

Ricardo Morado

knows a lot about the Vox organization in Galicia

, who was a candidate in 2020 for La Coruña and left the party two years later with significant criticism of the leadership. In conversation with this newspaper, he accuses the national leadership of acting with "absolute improvisation" and arriving late to the campaign in a region that during the rest of the legislature is barely part of Santiago Abascal's plans. The strategy, he says, reminds him “of the bad students who spend the year going to the foosball tables instead of going to class. Then the exam comes... And they don't even know what it's about. In fact, he emphasizes that he urged the party to "do internal self-criticism" after the poor results of 2020, but that he received no response or collaboration. "The BNG has experienced a notable improvement because it does what Vox does not: electoral campaign since the last ballot," he says to contrast the plan of the nationalists, shot in the polls, with Vox's "

low-cost

campaign ," which He has not even done anything to give exposure to his candidates, true "unknowns" even among his militancy: "There is no prior visibility work.

Juan García-Gallardo

[current vice president of the Junta de Castilla y León] was not known either but he was given visibility.

What Vox clings to to overcome the Galician "anomaly" is the demobilized vote in a regional key. Despite achieving 2.05% in the 2020 elections, in Bambú they highlight the 4.79% achieved last summer in the general elections. These 77,014 votes today would leave Vox on the verge of winning a seat, since the electoral barrier is 5%. This dualism is the great handicap to be overcome by Abascal, who has focused the pre-campaign and the start of the race to the polls on reactivating any voter that Vox may have among the 51% of abstentionists registered four years ago. But the forecasts, inside and outside Vox headquarters, are not exactly rosy.

A neighbor walks along Avión in front of one of the mansions.

Let's return to Avión, in the depths of the Ribeiro region, to see how the Galician voter alternates their ballot: on May 28, in the municipal elections, the PP obtained 457 votes and Vox 176; Less than two months later, in the general elections on July 23, the popular party counted 806 supports, while Abascal's party had 62 votes. A phenomenon that proves the "power" of the PP in its great Galician bastion, as defined in the municipality.

Despite focusing its electoral plan on a national horizon, Vox's proposal "does not fit into the narrative" with the Galician context, says

Gabriela Ortega

, political scientist and director of strategy at the Aleph Educational Institution, who points out the complaint of the lack of industrial fabric as the only Vox proposal aligned with the concerns of Galicians, although it is not one of the main demands. Like Merchán, he predicts a "national drag vote" that could improve their results compared to 2020, especially in those provinces in which on July 23 their number of voters tripled compared to what was obtained in the regional elections four years ago. . But both see it as unlikely that Vox will break into the Galician Parliament, the only territorial chamber that has resisted Vox's advance for a decade now on political paths.

But despite the national tone with which Vox wants to impregnate the campaign and the notably better results obtained in the general elections of July 23, experts point out that in Galicia the regional elections must be compared in terms of dynamics more with the local ones than with the national. And on May 28, except in Avión, the polls demonstrated the great weakness that Vox suffers from having hardly any structure and fabric at the provincial and municipal level. Proof of this is that many of the candidates coincide on the local, regional and general lists.

Lilian Cerdeira

, the Vox councilor in Avión, in fact was the head of the Senate list for Orense in the last general elections, held in July. Another symptom is the internal unrest that has emerged among Vox's own militancy in Galicia and that has been seen even in the presentation of the candidate,

Álvaro Díaz-Mella

, when a group of militants from Pontevedra, his district, booed him in his officialization ceremony with Santiago Abascal. "The members themselves can't even see it," Morado points out about this incident that occurred a couple of weeks ago and which the party downplays in the face of 18-F.

To all this Ortega adds the importance of the regional candidate despite guiding the campaign nationally. Although the national leader of the party, in this case Santiago Abascal, commands the electoral caravan, it is the sympathy and approval and, ultimately, the perception that the regional population has of the most local candidate that ends up tipping the balance. in front of the urn. A difficult situation for Vox to resolve, which chose Álvaro Díaz-Mella as its candidate at the gates of the campaign and according to the polls he is the least known of all the regional leaders running for the February 18 elections, despite the fact that he was already the president of the party in the province of Pontevedra and head of the list in the municipal elections.

Pontevedra is, in fact, the province along with La Coruña in which Vox maintains its highest hopes. The internal polls that Bambú conducted at the start of the campaign kept Vox in the fight for the last seat in these two districts. Furthermore, Vox defends his role because, if he gets a seat, it would be at the expense of the BNG and Sumar, the management explains, and it would not harm the PP, as has been hinted at on different occasions from Genoa. This emphasis that Vox places on La Coruña and Pontevedra is explained by demographics: they are the two most populated provinces in Galicia and on which Abascal's people will focus to definitively end their Galician misfortune.