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Gatopardism was Feijóo
On the leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, there is a phrase that symbolizes the ability of Sicilians to adapt throughout history to the different rulers of the island. “If we want everything to continue as it is, we need everything to change,” Fabrizio tells his uncle Tancredi in the famous novel. Since then in political science it is called gatopardista the politician who initiates a revolutionary transformation, but in practice only changes the surface of the power structures. More or less what is suspected that can happen in the PP with the arrival of Alberto Núñez Feijóo to the national direction. The same right as always with different faces.
The debut of the Galician at the head of the PP has already given some clues. And although he has not yet been crowned nor will he formally hold the reins of the party until April 2, his first steps after the coup against Casado, evoke an unequivocal exercise in gatopardism. Let everything change so that nothing changes. Or change the shapes a bit so that the background remains the same.
In the last control session in Parliament, with Pablo Casado already out and with the party in the hands of an Organizing Committee designated by Feijóo, the popular ones avoided the magnitude of the international crisis as a result of the War in Ukraine, charged as always against the Government and they accused Pedro Sánchez of using the war as an alibi to hide their responsibility in the economic deterioration and the energy crisis.
In Moncloa, they took note. And not only from the intervention of the PP spokesperson, Cuca Gamarra, which was the one in which all the newspapers were repaired because she was the one in charge of questioning Sánchez, but from that of each and every one of the deputies who intervened in the session of the last wednesday. According to government sources, it was choral music that “clearly responded to a strategy identical to that deployed so far and that responded to anything goes.”
With Casado or with Feijóo, “the PP is the same PP as always,” says a member of the Government, for whom “the right does not respect pandemics or wars and is never up to the challenges we face.” The situation that Europe is going through after the Russian invasion is of such magnitude, adds the same interlocutor, “that it should not admit the slightest noise, but rather follow the example of what we are seeing in Europe, where there has been no fissure between the heads of government, who are jointly seeking measures with which to respond to Putin and at the same time alleviate the energy crisis”.
The control session was the first sign, for the Socialists, that “the moderate Feijóo has portrayed himself sooner rather than later”, also by giving his approval to the government agreement with the extreme right in Castilla y León. And it is that although the Galician has made real watermarks during the week to distance himself from the agreement with those of Abascal and tried, through related media, to endorse the agreement to Pablo Casado, he has pricked the bone. And it is that the still president of the PP reneged in Brussels before the popular Europeans of a pact with those who criminalize migrants, deny sexist violence, reject the state of autonomies and defend exclusive measures that contradict basic democratic principles.
Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, for his part, already has assumed as its own the discourse of the extreme right on “orderly immigration” and “intra-family violence” and Feijóo himself has described the agreement as “perfectly legitimate”. And this while the international press, such as The Guardian, reminded the “moderate” Feijóo who his new partners were: a party that wants a “reconquest” of Spain, “the construction of an” insurmountable wall “around the enclaves of North Africa from Ceuta and Melilla, “the repeal of the laws on sexist violence and ending the hegemony of political correctness”. Archyde.com, for its part, drew attention to the fact that a far-right party had a share of power in Spain for the first time since Franco’s dictatorship.
And all while Núñez Feijóo tried to justify the unjustifiable and say one thing and its opposite at the same time without blushing and in less than 24 hours. Thus, on Thursday he described the pact as legitimate and on Friday, according to the reactions, he tried to disassociate himself from it by stating that “Sometimes it is better to lose the government than win it through populism”. Always, with the tagline, that he is not yet the president of the party and that, therefore, he has neither renounced his previous positions nor has he given in to anyone. An exercise that in La Moncloa they believe is useless because the agreement with Vox “bears his mark and authorization”, something that will drag “forever” and has allowed him to discover “his true face”.
The socialists maintain that the response to the two main challenges that the president of the Xunta faced when making the leap to the national arena – the corruption in his party and the relationship of the popular with Vox – has been premonitory of where he will travel the new PP: “In the shadow of suspicion that hangs over Ayuso for the commissions that his brother received from a company contracted by the Community of Madrid, Feijóo has tried to shelve it with a solemn declaration on the honorability of the Madrid president, despite the fact that the Prosecutor’s Office is keeping an investigation open and everything indicates that it is a long-term matter. And to his fake speech rejecting the extreme right and populism, he has followed his approval of a government coalition with Vox ”. Nothing is further from the fabricated image of moderation and centrality that the Galician has tried to cultivate for years.