MADRID.- The Popular Party won 40 of the 75 seats in the Galician Parliament, with 98% of the votes counted, a sufficient majority to remain in power, which translates into a setback for the Government of Spaincon Pedro Sanchez at the helm since 2018.
According to almost definitive results of the elections, it is a victory that reinforces the figure of its national leader after recent setbacks. Thus, the success of the PP’s strategy was confirmed, which brought forward these elections scheduled for mid-year to this Sunday, seeking a victory that would serve as a boost towards the European elections in June.
Polls in recent weeks had warned of the possibility that the socialist wing would seize power from the regional president, the conservative Alfonso Rueda, but in the end this did not happen.
“Rueda president,” the national leader of the PP, the Galician Alberto Núñez Feijóo, congratulated himself on social network
The left-wing nationalist party, the BNG, led by the charismatic Ana Pontón, improved its results compared to the 2020 elections, and reached 25 seats, but at the expense of the socialists of the president of the government, Pedro Sánchez, who only They won 9 seats.
These results are a relief for Feijóo, who was the regional president for 13 years and who was heavily involved in the campaign.
It is a boost to his image, which had been damaged when last July he won the legislative elections, but did not obtain the necessary support in the Spanish Parliament to govern, which the socialist Pedro Sánchez did, re-elected in November as president of the government.
As a sign of the interest that these elections aroused, participation was 67.27%, well above the 48.96% in 2020, according to official figures.
This Sunday more than 2.7 million Galicians could vote, almost half a million of them, 17.7%, abroad. Of the latter, a large part resides in Argentina, Cuba, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela.
This Sunday’s results showed that statements by Feijóo, who last weekend took an unexpected turn on the issue that has focused the political debate on the PP, did not have a major impact on the PP. Spain in recent months: a law to amnesty Catalan independentists being studied by Parliament.
The law, very controversial in Spain because it plans to withdraw the charges against hundreds of independence supporters for their involvement in the attempted secession of Catalonia in 2017, was the non-negotiable condition imposed by the separatist Carles Puigdemont’s party to Sánchez to give him its support, essential for his re-election.
Since Sánchez accepted this imposition, Feijóo did not go a day without criticizing Sánchez’s “humiliation” before the independentists by said law, which he considers unconstitutional and against which he has repeatedly called on his followers to demonstrate.
But in a twist, Feijóo acknowledged last Sunday that he had studied the amnesty for “24 hours” after the legislative elections in exchange for possible support from Junts to make him president, although he finally ruled it out.
Likewise, he defended a “reconciliation plan” for Catalonia and a possible pardon for Puigdemont, installed in Belgium to evade Spanish justice, under conditions.
In the final days of the Galician campaign, Pedro Sánchez attacked Feijóo, stating that he now defends what he criticized for months.
“In the morning he negotiates amnesty and pardons and in the afternoon he demonstrates against the independentists,” Sánchez criticized on Thursday at a rally.
Source: AFP
