"Either you back down or we'll ask for your head." The inside story of Vox's pact with Mazón

BarcelonaThis week's budget pact between Vox and Mazón has two winners and one loser. The first are Abascal's party and the Valencian president himself, who have achieved their goals. And the second is Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who has once again been overtaken by events and forced to bless a pact cooked up behind his back and goes beyond what he would have wanted on environmental, agricultural, and immigration issues.

Let's get down to brass tacks. This story begins before Christmas, when, at lunch, the Vox leadership informed the PP leadership of its conditions for greenlighting the regional budgets. What Santiago Abascal is demanding is that the PP renounce the policies that the European People's Party (PP) has promoted in recent decades in Brussels, hand in hand with the Socialists and Liberals, on issues such as agriculture and the environment, immigration, and security. Specifically, the far right is asking Feijóo to renounce the so-called Green Deal promoted by Ursula von der Leyen's first European Commission in 2020 with the goal of making the EU climate-neutral by 2050. But according to knowledgeable sources, Feijóo.

Mazón, Plan B

That's when Vox launches its Plan B, which is none other than putting pressure on what they consider to be the weak link in the PP right now, the man who, under intense internal scrutiny, needs the budget to survive politically. This is, evidently, Carlos Mazón. The Valencian president is also well-connected to Vox, to the point that he has dined with Santiago Abascal and has a good relationship with him. On this basis, they begin negotiating behind Feijóo's back, but from the outset, Mazón himself considers the price being asked too high and refuses to budge.

Meanwhile, Vox is starting to get nervous. The constant changes in the story about Mazón's arrival at the Cecopio, the protests against him, and, above all, the rulings by the Catarroja judge are putting the Valencian president in an increasingly untenable situation, and Vox is starting to consider dropping him to avoid being implicated.

Then February 24th arrives. That day, Mazón travels to Madrid to hold a breakfast briefing at the New Economy Forum, where he reveals the sixteen calls he made between 5:37 PM and 7:44 PM on the day of the DANA (National Anti-Terrorism Act), October 29th. According to ARA, at noon he had lunch with a confidant of Abascal, who delivered an ultimatum: "Either you back down, or we'll have no choice but to ask for your head." That threat changed everything. Mazón saw that he had no choice but to give in because if Vox withdrew its support, he would be lost.

It was then he himself who pressured Feijóo to give him the green light to read a political declaration in which he assumed all of Vox's ideological postulates and distanced himself from the European policies of recent years. A three-way exchange of roles began between Vox, on the one hand, and Palau and Génova, on the other. According to sources from the Popular Party, The reason, the PP's state leadership toned down the content of documents that were more "radical." However, Vox claims they didn't have to give in on anything substantial. And listening to Mazón's speech on Monday, it's hard to see where these supposed reductions came from.

Feijóo's dilemma

But the truth is that Feijóo had no alternative. Either he dropped Mazón, opening a difficult-to-manage political crisis in Valencia, or he accepted Vox's blackmail. At a certain point, Feijóo decided to make a virtue of necessity and accept the agreement, hoping that his concessions would also smooth out the budget pacts in Murcia, Aragon, and the Balearic Islands, so that, in his duels with Pedro Sánchez in Congress, he could boast that his regions had approved his budgets and not. However, so far, there has been no movement in these territories.

But the price Feijóo must pay is also high. First, because his political authority has once again been called into question, as not only has he been unable to force Mazón to step aside (as many party leaders are urging him to), but he is now a hostage to his pact with Vox. Second, because he has once again made an ideological U-turn, this time toward the far right, which doesn't quite fit with his strategy of presenting himself as moderate and with common sense. And finally, because the pact has upset the party's more centrist leaders, such as the Andalusian president, Juanma Moreno Bonilla, who often clashes with Vox in parliament on issues such as immigration.

The move, on the other hand, has paid off for Vox, as it has managed to drag the PP toward its positions and maintains the long-term goal of breaking the understanding between the EPP and the Social Democrats in Brussels to form a coalition between the Popular Party and the shifting far right. This is the move that neither Mazón nor Feijóo, immersed in the noise of everyday life and focused on their immediate political future, have been able to see.