Feijóo wants to run Spain like a CEO. Not easy with far-right Vox on the board of directors. – POLICY

Left-wing parties accuse the PP of hypocrisy, pointing out for example that it was a PP-led administration in Valencia that mismanaged the deadly floods of October 2024, during which 229 people died. Carlos Mazón, then president of the PP for the Valencia region, stayed in a restaurant for hours as the crisis developed. He only resigned a year later.

Alberto Ibáñez, a deputy for the left-wing Valencian Compromís party, said the PP “is not in a position to give lessons to anyone about public ethics.” The conservative party “keeps Mazón in his seat in the Valencian parliament to preserve his parliamentary protection and prevent him from being tried,” Ibáñez said.

Oddly, however, the socialists seem to be trying to play the PP at its own game. After Óscar Puente resigned as Transport Minister after the train accident, Sánchez chose his most technocratic and discreet minister to lead the Transport Department: Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo. Socialists also want to look like cool-headed managers.

Division of labor

For now, the PP and Vox seem content to stand aside, as long as it allows them to unseat Sánchez.

In a recent column in Diario de Cádiz, Enrique García-Máiquez, Vox’s Senate candidate, writing about a possible shift to the right by the PP, said that “it would be wise for the two parties ready to expel Sánchez not to step on each other’s toes on the dance floor.”

Political scientist Fernández Vázquez believes that there are tangible signs of cooperation. “Contrary to the 2023 campaign, Catalonia is now a subject that we do not talk about at all. Why? Because the right remembered that it had not obtained the majority three years ago due to extraordinary electoral participation in Catalonia which largely favored the socialists,” he declared.

But he warned that the PP-Vox truce would likely collapse after the elections.

“If they end up forming a government, things won’t be easy for Feijóo. Vox will put a lot of pressure on him and get some satisfaction from forcing his hand and humiliating him from time to time, because that is rooted in Vox’s origins.”