With the strategic slip-up of abortion, Isabel Díaz Ayuso's team has verified that Alberto Núñez Feijóo's leadership takes things differently.
The president of the Community of Madrid got into a puddle on Thursday by defending her personal position on abortion, which had not been strategically planned, according to her environment - where they recognize that it opens a leak with Vox - advocating that women can interrupt their pregnancy from the age of 16 without parental consent.
With that position, she distanced herself from that of the party leader, who bets that those under 18 need the authorization of their parents.
The discrepancy was not trivial, and Ayuso also focused on a very sensitive issue for the PP, abortion,
a hot potato for the popular ones where consensus is almost impossible between the different party families.
However, unlike what happened under the direction of Pablo Casado, Ayuso's involuntary torpedo was not responded to by missiles from Genoa.
"Feijóo went very well when they asked him about it later and the national leadership has not inflated this matter, as it did in his day with the Casado team", they congratulate themselves in the environment of the Madrid leader.
Things have changed a lot.
Unlike Casado, Feijóo does everything he can to avoid any conflict with the Madrid baroness, who continues to play the role of loose verse.
The current leader of the PP knows that he has to handle these tensions skillfully.
Feijóo is very aware of the precedents of history and also knows that a divided party is highly penalized electorally.
"The PP is the party of unity," he repeats in most of the internal events, such as the one this Friday with Ayuso at the opening of the PP course in Madrid, in the town of Alcalá de Henares, where both leaders meet they let each other see together and exchanged messages of thanks and praise.
The management of the discrepancy on abortion is an example of Feijóo's different strategy with Ayuso.
Instead of going to the clash, the PP leader tried to reconcile and put out the fire.
The same Thursday night, in a radio interview, he recognized the "legitimate discussion" in the PP about abortion and the "different personal positions" and "sensitivities" in the party.
And the day after he supported Ayuso at the opening of the Madrid PP course.
There he ironized about his alleged tensions.
"It amuses me that, when the Popular Party is doing well, someone invents discrepancies and disputes," he said in Alcalá de Henares.
“That it is insistently said that Isabel and I are very different proves that we have something that makes us very similar: that we both make the Sánchez government very nervous.”
The Madrid leader is also doing her part to prevent the relationship from cracking.
Last Saturday she traveled to Galicia to accompany Feijóo in his start-of-the-course act, making an effort because on Sunday he was starring in a party act at the other end of the country (in Cádiz).
He also suggested that the leader have dinner with her to coordinate strategies and talk about the municipal candidates.
The appointment was on Wednesday, in a tavern in Madrid, for more than three hours.
That does not mean that their paths will not continue to fork: Ayuso plans to hold an ideological convention at the end of October, while Feijóo has designed his assault on La Moncloa with a strategy that avoids the so-called cultural battle.
She will not give up making a difference.
"Some have discovered that Ayuso is a liberal," they point out in her surroundings to explain her position on abortion.
Feijóo cultivates affinity with Ayuso, also aware of the electoral pull of the Madrid baroness in a part of the PP electorate bordering on Vox, which is very good for him to collect.
But he does it at the same time that he allows himself to be seen symmetrically with the political reverse of the Madrid leader in the PP, the president of Andalusia, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, whom he also accompanied this week at the start of the PP course Andalusian in Malaga.
“Feijóo is not going to make Casado's mistakes.
You have to rely on Ayuso and Juanma because they are the two PP politicians who currently win elections better”, analyzes a popular leader, who believes that these balances are above all a message to the outside: “Feijóo is very consolidated internally, it is a message in an electoral key”.
In the popular dome they confirm this thesis.
“Nothing is by chance.
Juanma is going to add a lot in the generals, and Ayuso too.
The key is transversality”, stresses a member of the management.
On the other hand, Feijóo links his image less to other popular regional governments, such as that of Castilla y León.
The popular leader will be seen next Monday with Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, but he will do so in an act without a government profile – an agricultural fair in Salamanca – to continue marking distances from the pact with Vox.
All his steps are measured.
50% off
Subscribe to continue reading
read without limits
Keep reading
I'm already a subscriber