Feijóo fails in his attempt to get rid of Vox

MadridAlberto Núñez Feijóo has never subscribed to the idea of creating a cordon sanitaire around the far right. The only party with parliamentary representation in Congress, which he excludes, is EH Bildu, because the PP still raises the ETA scarecrow. However, when the PP leader became party president three years ago, he did so with the aim of minimizing Santiago Abascal's party and overcoming the previous era of Pablo Casado, marked by the struggle with Vox, which was then in full swing, which reduced the electoral space of the conservatives, immersed in a period of decline—also due to the... Feijóo, on the other hand, had just governed with an absolute majority in Galicia and arrived in Madrid in early 2022 boasting of having kept the far-right party at bay there. A situation he was unable to replicate as state leader of the PP.

Although in the last general elections on July 23, 2023, Feijóo propelled the PP to first place while Vox fell back with the loss of nineteen seats, the result left him far from not only the Moncloa Palace but also from shaking off his dependence on the far right. As he had already confirmed a couple of months earlier in five regions after the regional elections of May 28, without the votes of Abascal's party, he would not be able to govern the entire country. The absolute majorities that former PP presidents José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy did obtain are a scenario that no poll predicts Feijóo will be able to replicate. Faced with this dependence on unseating Pedro Sánchez and the alliances forged to govern in the Valencian Community, Extremadura, Murcia, Aragón, the Balearic Islands, and Castilla y León, Feijóo has ended up tied hand and foot.

This is what happened this week with the budget agreement that the Valencian president, Carlos Mazón, negotiated with the extreme right and that has caused the popular leader has ended up endorsing Vox's xenophobic theses on immigration and its climate denialism. Although Génova denies that this is a capitulation and sources from the PP leadership reacted to the announcement of the pact by stating that they feel "comfortable" with this discourse, which they assure does not imply any change in the PP's position, the truth is that it moves away from the moderation that it preached to the elders. Why do it with Vox?

If one of the recurring criticisms made of Casado was the lack of a clear and firm position on how to deal with the far right, Feijóo's strategic fluctuations have not generated a conclusive response either. In July of last year, the PP leader staged a distancing from Vox following Abascal's party's breach of agreements in the autonomous regions due to the PP's willingness to accept a limited distribution of immigrant minors. Faced with pressure from Vox, which demanded that the regions in which it had government agreements with the PP not accept any immigrant minors, Feijóo proclaimed that he would not give in to any "blackmail"And he defended the PP's role as a state party.

On the other hand, Vox clearly prioritized defending one of its main banners over maintaining regional posts, thus focusing its strategy, increasingly focused on the international arena, on wearing down the dream. A report from the 40db Institute for El País and Cadena SER published earlier this month predicts that Vox is the only party that would improve its results in a general election, while GESOP for El Periódico speaks of stagnation, and the CIS sees a slight downward trend for the far-right party.

The turn with immigration

However, despite the split eight months ago, Feijóo's stance on immigration has also been dragged down by Vox, since, even though the far right has abandoned regional executives, it remains necessary for the Popular Party presidents to approve budgets. At the end of last year The far right used the same script again: Abascal halted talks with the PP over the regional budgets due to the PP's rapprochement with the Spanish government, again on the same issue: addressing the distribution of immigrant minors who are overwhelming the facilities of the Canary Islands and Ceuta. With this threat as a backdrop, the PP entrenched themselves with Sánchez's executive in the face of the risk of making the approval of the regional budgets impossible, even though they also govern in both saturated communities.

Parliamentary arithmetic is not the only factor influencing this. Vox's discourse, which criminalizes immigration, sets a framework for public debate that contaminates the arguments of other political partiesThis isn't a new effect this week, although Mazón's public defense has made the PP's pull effect even more evident. To enter the clash with SánchezThe leader of the Popular Party (PP) has raised his tone in recent months, accusing the Spanish president of creating a "calling effect" and "migration chaos," and even praising the controversial policies on this matter of the far-right Italian president, Giorgia Meloni, whom Feijóo visited last September.

The PP has been repeating the mantra for months that their position is not dictated by Vox, while the far-right party celebrates its victory in imposing its position with the agreement with Mazón. The PP leadership rejects Abascal's role in leading them and asserts that Vox is obsessed with the PP. However, in any battle undertaken by Feijóo, the radicalizing factor of the far right emerges, as also occurred with the offensive against the amnesty law when Vox, even within the regional governments, with its constant protests at Ferraz or its demand to go beyond what legal instruments allow, also influenced some of the PP's decisions.