With not even seven months having gone by since the arrival of Alberto Núñez Feijóo at the presidency of the People's Party (PP) in place of Pablo Casado, doubts are beginning to emerge about his ability to lead the organization, his preparation and knowledge to tackle the problems, and also a lack of ability to respond to the complexity of having to travel around Spain's geography and speak daily with supporters who expect to hear something more than snaps of the whip about the crime of sedition, equality among Spaniards and appeals to the orphans of constitutionalism.
This Sunday, Feijóo was in Lleida and it could be noted that, beyond some disconnected sentences that recalled moments of Mariano Rajoy, his dialectical wardrobe is non-existent and any proposal for Catalan society is impossible to perceive. The fact that for 13 years - from 2009 to 2022 - he was president of the Xunta de Galicia is something that should surely be checked in Wikipedia because it doesn't seem that anything from that long period as leader of an autonomous community has stuck with him. The fact that he was elected president of the PP in April this year by 98.35% of the votes surely guarantees that he will be Pedro Sánchez's next rival in the battle for the Moncloa palace, but he runs the risk that the interval until the next elections will be too long.
The majority of polls continue to consider him the favourite to win the next elections, which in all likelihood will be held in February 2024 - they would normally be held a few months earlier, but Spain holds the presidency of the EU in the second half of 2023 - but this is not a blank cheque to walk into the Moncloa. First, because not all polls give the same data, and there is a difference between, for example, the prediction of the public CIS agency - today commanded by the Socialist, José Félix Tezanos - the only poll to hand victory to the PSOE if elections were held now, and, at the other end of the spectrum, the poll agencies that predict either an absolute PP majority with Vox or a greater uncertainty, now that it seems that the far right has gone into electoral retreat.
Be that as it may, if Feijóo does not wake up the PP's dormant electorate in Catalonia, it will stay home or vote for the PSC, repeating the path it took at the last Catalan elections, to try and prevent the victory of the pro-independence parties on February 14th 2021. In those elections, the PP was left with only 3 deputies and just over 100,000 votes. Far from even the 11 parliamentarians that Vox obtained with almost 220,000 votes. And electoral history recalls that there has never been a time when the PP have had options to reach Moncloa without also significantly cutting the electoral difference with the Socialists in Catalonia. And with a radically conservative discourse, they are not going to reach anyone beyond the voters of Vox and Abascal.