At the beginning of this week, the PP planned to focus its pre-election speech on security. Hence, on the day of the Toledo train accident, Alberto Núñez Feijóo was in Barcelona. The Popular Party had called the media at noon to Plaça Urquinaona to visit the shops affected by the looting. The message, which he had already deployed the day before from Madrid, was that only a Popular Party government could guarantee "order" and firmness in the face of unrest. However, the crash between the AVE and the Iryo on the Madrid-Andalusia line changed all plans. Feijóo rushed back to the Spanish capital and at 4:15 p.m. summoned the press to the party headquarters on Génova Street to react to the tragedy.

Almost 400 podcast episodes later, a resident of the Bages region could hold one of the keys to connecting with the youth vote in the next general elections. Jordi Wild, or Jorge Carrillo de Albornoz Torres (Manresa, 1984), has turned The Wild Project into one of the benchmark podcasts in the digital ecosystem in Spanish. Now, a few weeks before the elections, the content creator has managed to get Pedro Sánchez, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, Ada Colau, and Santiago Abascal to agree to step up to his microphones. The four interviews will be published on November 13, in a gamble that places a youtuber at the center of the communication strategy of the main candidates for Moncloa.

The disturbances of the last few days in A Coruña, Barcelona, and Bilbao have made security the main focus of the PP's discourse this week. Alberto Núñez Feijóo's strategy is to link the incidents directly to Pedro Sánchez and to position himself, in contrast to the socialist leader, as a guarantor of "order". He will do so, for example, by visiting businesses affected by the looting in Barcelona this Wednesday, just as his number 2, Miguel Tellado, visited Bilbao this Tuesday. "From the 30th onwards, there will be order. We will be implacable with the violent ones and the law will always be upheld," Feijóo stated at an event presenting the electoral list for Madrid for the November 29 elections.

“My first objective is for Sánchez to leave,” said Feijóo when Aimar Bretos (Cadena SER) asked him if he would make a pact with Vox. The end justifies the means: whitewashing the extreme right. We all know that if Sánchez does not lose, he will not govern, but it is a lack of respect for the citizenry and an unusual display of his limitations that Feijóo permanently deflects the ball and, instead of explaining what he wants to do and why he wants to do it, entrusts everything to the president's attrition.

The same faces, but a different interaction. Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Santiago Abascal are repeating as candidates for the right-wing bloc in the November 29 elections, but, unlike the previous elections three and a half years ago, the strategy of the PP and Vox on how to relate to each other has transformed. They have gone from the mistrust and crossed attacks of 2023 to a kind of non-aggression pact between the two parties, which have assumed that, for now, they are doomed to understand each other if they do not want to find themselves relegated to the opposition again. It is an assumption they no longer hide and which the right-wing media celebrates, urging Feijóo and Abascal not to repeat the mistakes—they are reproached for having been overconfident and harming themselves by fighting each other—that allowed Pedro Sánchez to continue governing to this day.

The president of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has entered the debate on the minimum interprofessional wage (SMI) and the taxation of labor income with statements that do not fully align with reality. In an interview this Friday on Cadena SER, the popular leader claimed that the Spanish government has made "a good deal" with the minimum wage increases because, according to him, the State collects more money through social security contributions and personal income tax (IRPF).

Alberto Núñez Feijóo begins to outline his conservative program for the Spanish elections on November 29th. The leader and candidate of the PP stated on SER that if he reaches the Moncloa he wants to reopen the debate on abortion and reform the euthanasia law, in an interview in which he openly accepted the scenario of a government with Vox to oust Pedro Sánchez from power. "I am a democrat," he said, regarding the possibility of having to rely on the ultra-right if he does not achieve a sufficient majority.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo is doubling down on his commitment to project an image of a forceful PP against Pedro Sánchez – also in response to the rise of Vox – and has chosen to place one of the party's harshest and most incendiary voices in the number two spot on the list for Madrid. Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo (Madrid, 1974) ascends to this position ahead of November 29th, in an election that she herself defines as "existential, historic, and decisive" for the future of Spain. The PP leader confirmed his choice this Thursday after days of hints that already suggested he would bet on a profile that has been characterized as an internal loose cannon. Álvarez de Toledo deploys her own sharp, ideological discourse which, in previous stages, she has not hesitated to direct even against her own party's leadership, as happened with Pablo Casado, with whom she ended up in conflict.

“There are owners who are afraid because, if a squatter enters their home, with a paper that proves they have ordered a pizza, no one can kick them out for a few years.” The PP candidate for the general elections, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, said this on Wednesday at an event in Seville, where he outlined his party's proposals on housing. According to the conservative leader, a person could prove their residence in a home with what has become popular as "the pizza method".

To no one's surprise, Feijóo has threatened education in Catalan in schools and has brought the concept of "indoctrination" out of the arsenal: "There will be no impositions or indoctrination in the classrooms." Translated, it means that education in Spanish is normal and that in Catalan it is an imposition. That October 12th is history but September 11th would be indoctrination. That children dressed as legionnaires or bullfighters are not the result of any imposition, but teaching notions about the social construction of gender would be.

This man who is running for the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, went to Catalonia to explain something he calls Contrato con España and which amounts to the most notable measures he intends to implement if Spain hires him as president of the government. They are a series of dreadfully stale right-wing things, which include the defense of national sovereignty (banal nationalism and not so banal in abundance), the “lightening” of the state (cuts in the labor, social, and cultural spheres), “organizing” immigration (open bar for xenophobia and aporophobia), the “guarantee” of pensions (they want to privatize them), the “strengthening” of public healthcare (they want to cut it even more), and a stellar, dazzling measure, without which the “good people,” who are the ones Feijóo addresses, cannot live: guaranteeing the teaching of Spanish in Catalonia, and it is understood that also in the Valencian Community and the Balearic Islands, where there are also natives who insist on speaking (and teaching in school!) the Catalan language. In the clause of the “contract” referring to education, there is also a commitment that candidate Feijóo assumes and that I cannot refrain from reproducing, because it constitutes a singular and enormous absurdity: “[...] education must reward effort, increase requirements, and reinforce the authority of the teacher. The contents will be developed by the royal academies”. The royal academies do not perform nor have they ever performed any type of educational or pedagogical task, and the works they produce have nothing to do with primary or secondary school. Now all that is missing is for the students to have to complete their training with a year on the Juan Sebastián Elcano.

The other day Feijóo announced that he would build a million apartments thanks to the fact that, with a government of his, there would be “less bureaucracy”, but instead of less bureaucracy, he said “less democracy”. He often does not know how to interpret what he is reading. The other day he said that he would only address the hardworking people and not the freeloaders, and when saying “freeloaders” (“scammers”) he did this. These slips make him meme fodder, and deepen the evidence that the personality of the favorite candidate in the polls to preside over Spain does not measure up, but not because he is often wrong, but because he is a politician from a past era.

Despite the PP's efforts to avoid any controversy before the November 29 elections, this Monday Alberto Núñez Feijóo once again took aim at the Catalan school language immersion system. Although his "Contract with Spain" only contains a generic commitment to "guarantee the teaching of Spanish throughout Spain" (as if that were not already guaranteed), in reality, what is being prepared, according to party sources, is the intervention of the Catalan system so that it more closely resembles the Galician one. And what is this Galician school system that Núñez Feijóo defends? Well, it is a system with 50% in each language and where the core subjects, such as mathematics, are taught exclusively in Spanish.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo wants to show that he has nothing to do with Pedro Sánchez. The PP leader describes the Spanish Prime Minister as someone without any moral values, who uses institutions for personal interest and who systematically lies to the citizenry. Faced with this, Feijóo staged an event this Monday in Madrid, surrounded by much of the party's top brass, where he pledged to be the complete opposite. "Spaniards deserve a president who always tells them the truth," he stressed, also committing to "the law," "effort," and "unity." The Popular Party president has signed a document, titled "my contract with Spain," which gathers this philosophy and twelve other points, including the promise to reinforce Spanish in Catalan classrooms.

Aware that to reach the Moncloa he needs to achieve a good result in Catalonia, where 48 of the 350 seats at stake are distributed, the PP candidate, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has returned to Barcelona in what is his third visit in just one month. In the first pre-campaign event, the Popular Party's presidential hopeful surrounded himself with the party's top brass in Catalonia to try to stop the rise of Vox.

Enthusiasm in the Catalan PP for who will be enthroned this Sunday as the PP candidate for Barcelona in the upcoming Spanish elections. The mayor of Badalona, Xavier García Albiol, has been selected as the Populars' candidate for Barcelona with the fundamental task of being the antidote to Vox, especially considering the great growth of the radical right-wing party in the Principality. Once the elections were brought forward, it immediately became clear that the most beloved person within the Catalan PP is Albiol. Furthermore, La Vanguardia was already pointing out that the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, was considering betting on him as a candidate.

Don't get overwhelmed. We aren't going to talk about out-of-body experiences here, but rather about possible economic leaders for the Spanish government after November 29th. And they don't need to be affiliated with the party. In his first terms, Pedro Sánchez turned to Nadia Calviño, an economist with good contacts in Brussels –where she was a director-general, for example–, who had also held senior positions with Pedro Solbes as minister in the executives of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Once appointed president of the European Investment Bank (EIB), in 2023 she was replaced by Carlos Cuerpo, former secretary-general of the Treasury. With a technical and low-key profile, this doctor of economics does not have a PSOE membership card, like Calviño, and projects a solvent image.

“We will not allow the attempt at emotional manipulation of the Spanish people.” These words are Feijóo’s, to justify the PP’s refusal to attend the minutes of silence for the death of Maricarmen Abascal. An exercise in insensitivity that portrays the character and manifests his inability to grasp the moods of the citizenry.

High-voltage pre-campaign in Spain for the November 29th elections. In the middle of 2026, eight years after Pedro Sánchez reached the presidency of the Spanish government, the PP draws an apocalyptic scenario if it does not win hand-in-hand with Vox to push for a "decisive change," while the Spanish government promises, now for real, to solve housing problems with courage and fight against those who "pull the strings" and harm the working classes. In the Andalusian town of Dos Hermanas and in Madrid, socialists and conservatives have contrasted two apparently antagonistic models of the country using language that has long denoted aggression.

A social outburst, two emergency decrees, a snap election in Spain, and a general strike. The magnitude of the consequences of the Maricarmen case explains the shock over the death this Wednesday of the 87-year-old woman, who had become, following her eviction in Madrid, a symbol of the fight for the right to housing. Social movements have been mourning the passing of Maricarmen Abascal since last night and, as expected, her death has fully entered into the pre-campaign for the November 29 elections. Political messages of condolence have turned into crossed attacks between the parties, and the left has erupted against the PP, which has vetoed minutes of silence in memory of the woman in the Senate and in the Assembly and City Council of Madrid.