Monday morning was difficult in Genoa. The PP had won the general elections of 23-J with a rise of 47 seats compared to November 2019, but its expectations of reaching Moncloa had vanished. His harvest was 136 deputies, far from the 150 that the popular had set as a bar; a ribbon that ended up being a noose around the neck. Now it’s time to analyze what went wrong when all the internal tracking predicted a comfortable victory and a sum with Vox assured, and try to play the cards that the polls have dealt with an almost impossible arithmetic.
Accustomed to absolute majorities, Alberto Núñez Feijóo is now trying to digest the blow while seeking to make visible that he won the elections. A triumph that, sterile as it may be, also “forces” him to lead the “dialogue” with the other parliamentary groups. But, without the support of the PNV, which has already officially informed him that it does not want to sit down with him to negotiate anything, he has no way of adding up on his own and he needs the PSOE. Even so, the decision is not to throw in the towel and try it, whatever it may be, because it treasures the legitimacy for it. “To say that you do not have support simply because you have spoken with a group seems to me a hasty conclusion,” said the leader of the PP in Santiago de Compostela on Tuesday.
Feijóo intends to contact the PSOE once the CERA vote is known, of the Spaniards living abroad -as of Friday-, to ask it as a “State party” to let the list with the most votes rule in exchange for closing agreements in matters of state. It is his last trick to try to emerge victorious from a hypothetical investiture in which he also needs the ‘yes’ from Vox, complicating the operation. But no matter how hard he tries, the Socialists are not considering giving in to the claims of the PP leader. They are convinced that they will be able to attract the abstention of Junts, which insists on amnesty and the referendum, to retain the Government.
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Those of Santiago Abascal do not seem to be going to make it easy for them either. They attribute their failure on 23-J – they have lost 19 deputies and 623,000 votes – to the “demobilization” caused by Feijóo by “selling the bear’s skin” ahead of time without waiting to know the verdict of the polls. “The useful vote that the PP called has served to be useful to Sánchez,” they reproach the Genoa leadership, which they also blame for losing five decisive seats to have achieved an absolute majority.
Internal document
The conservatives have also cast numbers and if all the Vox votes had gone to their ranks where those of Abascal had a difficult time obtaining a seat, now the scenario would be different and Feijóo would be a happy man. According to an internal document, to which this newspaper has had access, if in seven of the constituencies where the radical right did not obtain representation –Pontevedra, La Rioja, Burgos, Albacete, Girona, Lleida and Tarragona– the PP ballot had been chosen, the conservatives would have had an extra seat for each of them.
In the Catalan provinces they would have subtracted it from Junts while in the rest the loser would have been the PSOE. With which the final accounts would be very different: the PP would go from 136 to 143 seats, the PSOE would drop from 122 to 117 and Junts from 7 to 5. The sum of the bloc on the right, together with UPN and predictably the Canary Coalition would reach 178 parliamentarians, two above the absolute majority necessary to carry out an investiture.
“Vox has played its cards very badly,” points out a popular baron, who acknowledges that, in any case, the regional pacts were not managed well. In its post-electoral analysis, Genoa will have to measure whether they were a drag as it seems, in addition to defining what her relationship with those of Abascal will be from now on with their sights set on an electoral repetition.
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