Alberto Nunez Feijoo likes to remember that, deep down, he is only a peaceful “boy from town” rural northwestern Spain country. A humble, direct and even boring guy, as he likes to define himself.
The conservative candidate of the Popular Party is almost unknown outside of Spain, but he has been the most solid regional leader in the country so far this century and has never lost an election.
Feijoo was a real political steamroller during the 13 years that he governed the region of Galiciain the northwest of Spain, homeland of the 20th century dictator Francisco Franco and the former president of the Government Mariano Rajoy, who led Spain between 2011 and 2018 as leader of the PP.
Feijoo came to the government as regional president of Galicia in 2009 and accumulated four absolute majorities until 2022when he resigned to head towards Madrid, with the mission of saving his party from the biggest leadership crisis in its history.
Without mincing words
Feijoo has forged his public image as a leader without mincing words. In his own opinion, he is the antithesis of the current president of the Spanish Governmentthe socialist Pedro Sanchez, whom Feijoo accuses of saying or doing anything in order to hold on to office.
“Feijoo is an experienced politician, a good manager, who It does not attract attention for better or for worseand that can even be positive”, says Miguel Anxo Bastos, professor of Political Science at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC).
“He does not have a very marked ideological agenda, but he is more progressive than his party. He’s kind of a conservative social democrat defending the role of the state. You don’t want to revolutionize anything, just make the services work,” he adds.
But her critics say that under her harmless pearance lies a ruthless activist, that come election time he can throw mud like the best of them. Feijoo’s only motto since he was named Spain’s conservative leader is “abolish sanchismo,” a way of referring to Sanchez’s way of governing.
“Repealing sanchismo refers to the way of doing politics, not to the bottom (of the Sanchez government). If Feijoo governs there will be no great effect about the way many policies are being regulated. At most, it will go back to a previous step in some significant laws of Sanchez, such as the Historical Memory Law or the Trans Law”, comments Xose Luis Barreiro, a prominent Galician ex-politician and political scientist, author of a compendium of facts and thoughts of the Popular Party candidate.
“If he is going to make a mistake, it will not be to turn around the PSOE’s social policies, but to insist more than necessary on them,” he adds.
Barreiro believes that the great virtue of Feijoo it is his mastery of time. After a successful career as a high-level civil servant in Galicia and Madrid, which included a stint as head of Spain’s postal service, he joined the PP at 41 and is now running in the general election for the first time at 61.
He will be the oldest Spanish president to hold office for the first time.
Even in his private life, Feijoo is a man who waits for his moment. He met his current partner, Eva Cardenas, a former executive at Zara Home, an Inditex firm, in 2009, but they did not start a relationship until four years later. In 2017, when Feijoo was 55 years old, the couple’s first child, Alberto, was born.
It was a joy for the candidate’s mother, Sira Feijoo, who in a 2009 electoral video lamented that her son “He says that he has married Galicia, but Galicia does not give me grandchildren”. A somewhat monastic statement that perfectly sums up the spirit of Feijoo.
In the same video, Micaela, his sister, used the terms “distant” and “bookworm” to describe the image that, she said, the conservative candidate conveys.
Vox’s dilemma
Feijoo has an unpleasant dilemma ahead of him: fform a coalition with the far-right party Vox in case he does not obtain an absolute majority, something that the polls almost rule out. It would be the first time that the extreme right has entered the Government of Spain since the end of the Franco dictatorship.
Feijoo has already subtly admitted that if he needs it, he will do it, as he blessed Vox’s entry into various regional governments after the municipal and regional elections last May.
Vox has made a strong campaign to eliminate gender violence laws and roll back the powers of regional governments, positions that could put him in conflict with Feijoo, especially given his background as a speaker of the local Galician dialect and representative of Spain’s decentralized state.
Compared to Vox candidate Santiago Abascal, and even to the younger generation of the Popular Party, Feijoo is a retrospective conservativemore interested in balancing budgets than in the culture wars with the Spanish left.
“Vox could get him into trouble because he doesn’t feel comfortable in the culture war and he doesn’t have experience in coalition governments,” says Professor Bastos.
“We cannot expect him to repeal the pillars of the current government, it is not his style. Feijoo does not look for problems. He governs without fanfare or major government crises. Logic says that not much will change if he becomes president, Although it depends on the pressure you receive from Vox ”add.
Feijoo could be weighed down by his relationship with Marcial Dorado in the 1990s. Dorado was a businessman who, while serving the Galician administration when Feijoo was number 2 in its Health department, also ran a notorious cigarette smuggling ring.
Feijoo and Dorado maintained a close friendship for almost a decade. They shared summer getaways and Christmas vacations. In 2013 several photogrhs of his travels and boat trips in Galicia since 1995.
One photogrh in particular, showing Feijoo in a bathing suit and sunglasses posing aboard a yacht with Dorado, has haunted him ever since. Dorado is currently serving 10 years in prison for drug trafficking and money laundering.
Feijoo has repeatedly said that as soon as he learned of Dorado’s illegal business, he immediately cut ties with him. However, in a radio interview on Friday, he acknowledged that “at that time (Dorado) was a smuggler. That is to say, when I met him he had been a smuggler, never a drug trafficker ”.
The left-wing parties are trying to bring out that difficult-to-explain friendship in the final stretch of the campaign.
AP Agency
Source: Clarin
