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19-02-2024
MADRID: Voters went to the polls in Spain’s northwest region of Galicia on Sunday in a close-run race where polls have suggested the opposition conservative People’s Party (PP) could lose an absolute majority that it has held for 15 years.
The PP have ruled the region for all but four of the past 35 years and their leader, Alberto Nunez Feijoo, is a former Galician regional government chief.
A poll published on Feb. 11 by 40dB for El Pais newspaper found that 46% of voters would prefer a coalition of the Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG) and the Socialist Party to the PP retaining power.
While battling to retain control of its heartland, the PP is also contending with internal conflict after Feijoo appeared to support a conditional amnesty for Catalan separatists, a measure that has been promoted by Spain’s left-wing coalition government and previously opposed by the PP.
One unlikely possibility is that Gonzalo Perez Jacome, the mayor of Ourense, could become kingmaker. Perez, who has dressed up as a Power Ranger and Superman during the campaign, is fighting to force the regional government to repay “its historic debt” to the town.
Official results are expected by 11 p.m. (10.00 GMT). Results from overseas voters, accounting for 476,000 emigre Galicians, will be counted by Feb. 29.
However, it has been revealed that in the wake of his party’s victory in July’s general election, Núñez Feijoo had himself briefly considered an amnesty in exchange for the support of Catalan nationalist parties. This has unleashed a crisis for the conservative that has overshadowed his Galician campaign.
The reports came from an unnamed PP politician who met last weekend with a group of journalists. The source was also reported as saying that the party’s leader was still willing to discuss the possibility of a “conditional” pardon for Carles Puigdemont, the self-exiled former Catalan president who would be the highest-profile beneficiary of the government’s amnesty.
This has drawn a backlash from the left and right.
“Making hypocrisy your only political hallmark leads to defeat,” said former Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodríguez Zapatero “and that’s what has happened to the PP.”
The leader of the far-right and stridently unionist Vox party, Santiago Abascal, accused Feijoo of “massive political fraud” and of offering “impunity to coupmongers”.
The PP has been scrambling to present the revelations in a different light, playing down the tone of the remarks and even denying their veracity. “What we have always said is the same,” said Carlos Mazon, the party’s president of the Valencia region. “It’s no to the amnesty, no to pardons, no to blackmail.”
This is the latest in a series of apparent errors by Nunez Feijoo that have undermined his position. He was appointed party leader on the back of his electoral success in Galicia and with a reputation as a moderate. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
