There are still 19 days to go before the start of the election campaign in Extremadura, but the PP is starting to warm up its engines this Sunday with the participation of its president, Alberto Núñez Viejo, and the chairman and re-election candidate, María Guardiola, in their first joint public event, with Extremadura flags completely replacing those of the PP.
Known opinion polls coincide with Guardiola’s first victory on 21 December (the Socialist Party will win it in 2023), but the current scenario could be repeated: a popular party based on Vox, which could add more MPs, and the Socialists losing several seats in the Assembly. For this reason, Guardiola’s strategy involves winning votes from the Socialist Workers Party (his campaign slogan is “Focus on moving forward”) and measuring his words against the far right so that the mistakes of the past two years are not repeated.
At the beginning of her intervention, the President of Extremaduran focused on highlighting the accusations against the Socialist Workers Party candidate, Miguel Angel Gallardo, who is awaiting the oral trial for the appointment of Pedro Sanchez’s brother to the Badajoz Provincial Council. Guardiola asked, “Which party elects a man who deceived the region and used public money to secure his position as leader? Which Extremadura do we want, dignity or football?”
Figo also referred to the Socialist candidate’s procedural situation: “What I will say to Maria Guardiola is to win the election against the person who corrupted her brother. Sánchez believes he is the master and he cannot afford to have Popular Party governments make him feel very small,”
At his first public event, held in Lobon (population 2,734, just 30 kilometers from Mérida), Guardiola pointed to another backbone that the PP will use against the Socialists in these elections: the Almaraz nuclear power plant (Cáceres). In this sense, the PSOE was accused of “wanting to leave Extremadura without a future” due to the closure of these facilities, even though the companies Iberdrola, Endesa and Naturgy officially requested an extension of their activity only two weeks ago and are waiting for a comprehensive report on the safety of the plant, which must be prepared by the National Security Council (CSN). Despite this, the commission’s president insisted that the government “no longer has excuses” to extend Almaraz’s life.
Figo even pledged, as a future candidate for prime minister, that the Extremadura nuclear power plant “will not be closed,” and described Extremadura as a “treason” because it did not prevent its cessation of activity. For this reason, Congress’s rejection last Thursday of the People’s Party amendment to cancel the final shutdown date for the Almaraz, Asko 1 and Cofrentis nuclear power plants was seen as an “insult” by the government and some of its partners.
It seems that Maria Guardiola was going to keep a strategic silence about her former partners in the Vox party because after her criticism of the Socialist Workers Party, she referred to the two years she spent at the head of the regional government of Extremadura, with positive data on falling unemployment and job creation, reducing the time of dependency and remaining on the waiting list for surgical intervention, despite the fact that Extremadura patients wait longer than average for an operation or to get an appointment with a specialist.
But the criticism directed at Fox came, but it was quick. Another slogan of the People’s Party in the coming weeks will be the “clasp” carried out by the PSOE, the Vox Party (and sometimes also the Unity Party for Extremadura) in the Assembly in order to vote up to 40 times in the same direction and issue decrees and actions that Guardiola’s Executive Council dared to take to Parliament without negotiation, despite being a minority. According to Guardiola, his former far-right partners, whom he may need again after 21 minutes, “are dazzled by the lights of the ballot boxes instead of sitting down to work in Extremadura.”
The head of the People’s Party also asked his people in Lupon not to trust opinion polls, “because the blockade will try everything and we must strive for more.” “Let us not take anything for granted,” he warned.
Moreover, the Extremaduran leader described Vox as “an anti-system party that has no bills to pay” and stressed that it is a “useless” party because it is “afraid to govern” due to the departure of the far right from all regional governments with the People’s Party in the summer of 2024.
The Popular Party candidate also referred to the feminist movement, which the left began to question after signing the agreement with Vox and ruling in coalition with the extremist party. “They have a problem: I am the first president of the province of Extremadura and I am from the People’s Party, and this is very painful for those who have the pure spirit of feminism, those who have taken rapists out on the streets, those who have failed anti-abuse bracelets, and when the lights go out, they consume prostitution, they eat women like cattle.”
For his part, Figo noted that while the head of government, Pedro Sanchez, is trying to “delay the inevitable as much as possible,” Maria Guardiola is “presenting elections to confront everything” and doing so “with determination, courage and respect” for citizens. He added: “With Maria, change began and must be completed. Change begins when the earth wants to live better.”
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