Several friends offered their condolences.
Others said they were glad for his return "because of politics."
He was "pleasantly" surprised by the affectionate welcome messages sent to him by "several government ministers" of the coalition.
Borja Sémper (Irún, 47 years old) has returned to the front line of the PP as a campaign spokesman and member of the steering committee, losing money and comfort —in the last three years he has been director of institutional relations for the Ernst & Young consultancy— .
He arrives with a specific mission, directly commissioned by the leader: to provide "centrality and moderation" to the party in an election year.
He is convinced that this time he will not be the loose verse of the PP.
“I am not going to commune with mill wheels.
I've never done it and I'm not going to do it now.
I am very comfortable in this project, ”he assures.
He boasts of knowing how to differentiate the personal from the political.
He says he has a “bomb-proof” relationship with Santiago Abascal —they have known each other since they were 17— but it was, among other reasons, Pablo Casado's rapprochement with Vox's proposals that pushed him out of politics in February 2020. What the real threat of ETA, which tried to kill him at least three times, had not achieved, was achieved by disenchantment: Sémper, who had his first bodyguard at the age of 19, had stopped feeling comfortable among his own.
When Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, then spokesperson in Congress and a star signing for Casado's team, called the members of the Basque PP lukewarm, she was stirred up in public: "It has cost us blood, sweat and tears, literally, to defend an idea of plural Spain in the Basque Country.
And probably, while some walked comfortably on soft carpets, others risked our lives here defending the Constitution and coexistence”.
But Álvarez de Toledo was not the only one who considered moderation a defect, not a virtue.
And she Sémper she decided to change scenery: move to Madrid and try, for the first time in almost 30 years, another profession.
Some of those who wanted to tie him short are still in the PP, although they have lost organic responsibilities and media exposure privileges.
Sémper embodies Alberto Núñez Feijóo's strategy for this election year: contain Vox and capture votes (undecided, disenchanted...) in the center and even on the left.
It is the same strategy with which he presented himself to the congress that elected him president of the party last April, but Feijóo has had to remember it and underline it with the recovery of the moderate who left because in these months he has made us forget on more than one occasion the Promises from the first day, among others, not to insult the rival, dispense with hyperbole and seek agreements with the Government: “Moderation is not lukewarm.
Dialogue is not submission... ”, he said in his first speech as president of the PP.
Sémper says that now he does appreciate “a change of course” in the PP and that they no longer follow Vox.
The party has decided to keep a low profile, to preserve its institutional image, in the demonstration against Pedro Sánchez this Saturday in Madrid.
But the popular campaign spokesman was received with an incendiary tweet from the general secretary, Cuca Gamarra, regarding the assault in Brazil;
And in these first days as spokesperson, it has been Vox who has monopolized the agenda with the attempt to introduce coercive measures for women who decide to have an abortion in Castilla y León, where they hold the regional vice presidency thanks to an agreement blessed by Feijóo.
The third controversy related to the popular this week also deviates from the path of moderation: the signing of two defectors, Carlos García Adanero and Sergio Sayas (both were expelled from UPN last March) and the election of the former as mayoral candidate from Pamplona.
Last July, García Adanero declared in Congress that ETA still exists.
In the euthanasia law debate, he said: “This is like the suicide bomber.
The police and psychologists can be sent to him or pushed.
You are going to push him."
Sayas, for his part, referred to Sánchez's pacts as "gross, nauseating and petty."
In these three years away from politics, Sémper explains that he has verified "the disconnect between political and social discourse" and how "the extremes try to drag the two big parties down".
"It is true that it was very easy to reflect on the need for an uplifting policy from the sofa, but the dynamics of Madrid surprise me a lot, the intersecting interests, and I think I have the advantage of coming home uncontaminated by all that."
He left convinced that he was not interested in the political climate, but admits that in this time, every day he has thought about what he would say or do if he were still inside.
He now believes that leaving behind the compadreo with Abascal, the PP has an opportunity to convince the public in the same way that he has been "re-illusioned",
but he will spend the whole year as a campaign spokesman for the populars answering the same question: Will they agree with Vox?
All the polls indicate that they will need them and in these first days back it has been the extreme right party that has diverted the focus from the issues that the popular wanted to talk about, such as the releases for the
law of yes is yes.
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