The intrahistory of the absence of Feijóo in the inauguration of Mañueco

Last Tuesday, during one of the meetings that Alberto Núñez Feijóo held with the union leaders in his office, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco called him.

“Do you mind if I pick up the phone?” the PP leader asked his interlocutor.

The president of Castilla y León called after Feijóo had left the chair empty in the solemn act in which he had just become regional president after a pact with the extreme right.

"Don't worry, we'll set up that visit soon," the PP leader promised, and hung up the phone.

Feijóo agreed with Mañueco that he will go to Castilla y León to support him publicly.

The baron has been snubbed because the leader wanted to avoid the photo with Santiago Abascal five days before the French elections, in which Marine Le Pen's ultras knock on the doors of the Elysee.

On Monday of the week prior to Mañueco's inauguration, the general coordinator of the PP, Elías Bendodo, said that Feijóo had transmitted to the management committee "his interest in attending" the inauguration in Valladolid "as long as the agenda allow it”.

The trap was in the phrase, because the Galician leader reserved the wild card of the agenda, as if the agenda, and not him, led the PP.

The management began to look for options to get around an image that some of its members were clear was not the way to go, despite the fact that Feijóo had not tried to prevent the coalition government with Vox in Castilla y León and let it happen.

“Many scenarios were considered.

We were looking for a formula so as not to offend Mañueco and show that we are not looking for that government coalition”, says a leader.

Leaving the chair empty in Castilla y León presented several problems.

To begin with, with Mañueco himself - who has accepted the solution of a post-hoc visit - and, later, with the Spanish right, which has normalized Vox in a fairly majority way.

"The most comfortable thing was to go to Valladolid," they maintain in the leader's team.

In the leadership of the PP they admit that they feel the pressure of the media right due to Feijóo's attempts to distance himself from Abascal's party and to rebuild the relationship with the Prime Minister.

In France, the ultra Marine Le Pen has posed with six cats to sweeten her image, the so-called de-

In Spain, the leader of Vox has not needed it: the PP's strategy in the Pablo Casado stage had already done much of the work for him.

At this point, distance with the extremists to the right of him is much more expensive for the popular.

The solution that was found to avoid the photo with Abascal in Valladolid was to fit that same Tuesday the appointment with the union and employer leaders, which Feijóo had already promoted, at the national headquarters of the PP, on Génova street in Madrid.

Everything had to be squared.

Some of those summoned made problems for the meeting to be held on Monday, and Feijóo moved skillfully to bring them all together on Tuesday and kill two birds with one stone.

Some were told that the others wanted Tuesday, others that all the others agreed to go to Genoa... "We were very clear that it was an alibi," says one of the attendees at the PP headquarters.

But they accepted, and the result was a

for Feijóo, say the popular.

"He has changed the photo with Abascal, which everyone expected, for the photo with the leader of UGT, with which he is launching a message of centrality and moderation", they expose in the core of the leader.

However, in the meeting with the leader of the UGT, Pepe Álvarez, and with that of the CC OO, Unai Sordo, Feijóo heard reproaches from the trade unionists.

Sordo conveyed his concern that the PP would normalize Vox and Álvarez complained that in Pablo Casado's stage the PP came close to Abascal's anti-union positions.

With both he spoke of the extreme right, but in private the leader of the PP says the same as in public: that he wants the most voted list to govern, and that the PSOE does not abstain from letting the PP govern.

The union leaders ask Feijóo to show his turn regarding Casado by now supporting the labor reform agreed with the bosses, and which went ahead thanks to the fact that a PP deputy was wrong to vote in favor of the party's slogan of doing it against.

“It is very important that the PP is in the great State agreements.

Not having given support to the labor reform, the pension reform or the

Law is an anomaly that goes against the interests of the Spaniards as a whole”, says Álvarez.

“Feijóo is wanting to suggest a change in language and tone, but he has to confirm that there really is a change in the PP's scorched earth policy.

A test of cotton would be to review his position on the labor reform, ”says Sordo.

While the trade unionists entered Génova, 13, in Valladolid, the leader of the extreme right symbolically appropriated the Government of Castilla y León flanking Mañueco.

"There was no place in Spain more important for us than being at this inauguration to support this Government," Abascal boasted.

In the absence of the Galician baron, the main message of the PP in Valladolid was transmitted by Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who welcomed the inauguration of a stage of "

socialism " by Castilla y León.

The Citizens MEP and former socialist leader Soraya Rodríguez, of Valladolid origin, lamented on Twitter those words of the Madrid president.

“Remember the areas free of LGTBQ ideology in Poland that we democrats from the EU fight against.

After what comes?

feminism

?

immigration

?

press

?” she wondered.

The debate on the extreme right in the PP is crossed by the European context.

In the PP they believe that they have saved the first assault with Vox, but they also look at France this Sunday.

Le Pen's result in the French elections may have repercussions on his next steps and absences.

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