The PP went on vacation last Christmas with the satisfaction of having achieved 43% of the vote in Extremadura and a defeat for the PSOE in one of its historic territories. A month and a half later, María Guardiola fearfully contemplates the growing possibility of a repeat of the elections, which has also unsettled the national leadership of Alberto Núñez Feijóo. To the point that both have already verbalized, with nuances, the request to the socialists to abstain. Meanwhile, Vox is rubbing its hands in the middle of a cycle that is putting it at its best before the citizens.
The Extremadura Assembly will hold the first debate and investiture vote at the beginning of next March. In the PP they assume that Guardiola will reap a defeat that will open a period of two months before the electoral repetition, an abyss into which those of Feijóo do not want to look due to the certain risk of obtaining worse results than on December 21.
Santiago Abascal upset his theoretical allies when, at the start of the Extremaduran campaign, he proposed that Vox was going to demand entry into the autonomous governments from which he left voluntarily in 2024. In the PP they took it as another discursive element of the extreme right. But since the vote count ended, all the conversation has revolved around his presence in the regional Executive.
“The least important thing is the positions. I understand that they should be the least important thing,” Guardiola said this Tuesday to focus on the fact that, as he assured, the programmatic agreement with Vox is practically closed. But Abascal’s people want specific advice with an assigned budget.
Vox has asked for Agriculture, Economy and a vice presidency that would have Interior, Security and Immigration. A demand that far exceeds the “proportionality” that Feijóo has publicly demanded from Abascal. The ultra leader picked up the gauntlet and, with his sights set beyond 2027, is already encouraging the surprise of the PP with the same agenda that has destroyed the classic right throughout Europe to be replaced by a populist extreme right.
“What cannot be is that the PP has to disguise itself as Vox,” Guardiola snapped on Tuesday. A phrase that shows her anger and that is reminiscent of 2023, when the then candidate gave her word that she did not plan to govern with the extreme right. A trip to Madrid and a date with Feijóo and Ayuso forced her to change her mind. And in Vox they wrote down his registration.
But Guardiola said something else on Tuesday: “I called Mr. [José Luis] Quintana, who is the person who is in charge of the PSOE manager. I have asked him for responsibility with what the polls have said. And of course I have asked them to abstain, which is what they have to do.” The acting president thus confessed a movement that the PP believes to be fruitless, but which opened the door to criticism from Vox. Those of Abascal base their electoral success on the transfer of votes from the PP and encourage whenever they can the story that points to those of Feijóo as “the blue PSOE”, willing to agree with Pedro Sánchez whenever necessary.
And it is true that the same Feijóo who has repeated on dozens of occasions that he would never agree with the ‘sanchismo’ has ended up negotiating and agreeing on the renewal of the CGPJ, the Board of Directors of RTVE or a constitutional reform. Or Mercosur in Europe. Feijóo regrets almost every week the absence of institutional dialogue with the Government and the lack of information on “state matters”, such as foreign policy.
Feijóo supports the abstention of the PSOE
Vox returns each discursive barrage of the PP with double the force. The party leaders believe that knocking down Guardiola will not penalize them. They are not afraid of repeating the elections, much less of further entangling the mess in the middle of the election campaign in Castilla y León, called for March 15.
After the fiascos of Extremadura and Aragón, where Jorge Azcón called to see how he lost two deputies and Vox doubled its presence, the PP also fears problems for Alfonso Fernández Mañueco and, already in June, for the jewel in the crown: the Andalusia of Juan Manuel Moreno’s absolute majority.
After the recent elections in Aragon, Feijóo reiterated his request for “proportionality.” And he also demanded “responsibility” from Vox. The result was worse for Azcón than for Guardiola, at least in arithmetic terms. And they will maintain their strategy.
The turn came this Wednesday, when sources from the PP leadership expressly supported the option of an abstention from the PSOE to make Guardiola president, even being aware of the difficulty it would entail to govern given that there would not be a guaranteed majority to carry out the budgets. “We prefer abstention than governing in coalition with Vox,” an authorized PP spokesperson told journalists in Congress. “If they want to stop the extreme right, the way is to invest Guardiola,” they added.
But they also prefer a coalition in the Government than a repeat election. “There must be an investiture as soon as possible,” the same sources pointed out. “Repeat [elecciones]”Never,” they settled, to try to point out Vox for the blockade: “If they don’t want to lower anything, the scenario gets complicated.”
Shortly after, the PP leadership qualified themselves, without correcting themselves. “On an absolutely general basis, we prefer governments alone,” official sources pointed out. “Evidently, we prefer not to hand over power or advice to other parties. Since neither Vox nor PSOE intend to abstain in exchange for nothing, we only have to explore obtaining support in exchange for something. And that something can be seats on the government councils,” they added. “With the PSOE we do not want to govern. The only possible option is to analyze the political context with Vox in each autonomous community,” they concluded.
The PP has thus gone in the short month and a half of 2026 from opening up to “proportional” coalition governments with Vox to demanding the abstention of the PSOE to invest Guardiola. A lack of definition that was already experienced in the previous electoral cycle.
Feijóo arrived in Madrid in 2022 with the claim of having the antidote to the extreme right and publicly demanding the mutual support of the bipartisan system. This was expressly raised with Pedro Sánchez in their ‘face to face’ before the 2023 elections. At the same time, the PP closed dozens of regional and municipal agreements with the ultras, which permeated that general election campaign. In his failed investiture, the PP leader only garnered the support of Vox, the UPN deputy and the representative of the Canary Coalition, who also voted in favor of Sánchez.
The PP thus continues without resolving its relationship with Vox. A few days ago, the official PP account on Twitter wrote “up to here” in response to a message from the ultra formation. An expression copied from what Pablo Casado already said to Abascal in Congress in 2020, more than five years ago.
The PSOE blocks abstention
The PSOE leadership is trying to cut off any hint of debate about the possibility of allowing the PP to govern so that it does not depend on the extreme right. Former president Felipe González mentioned it at an informative breakfast after the disaster in Aragón in which he recalled that Jorge Azcón has more seats “than the entire left combined.” But the message no longer only comes from the old guard. The mayor of Mérida, Antonio Rodríguez Osuna, has opened the door to a negotiated abstention if María Guardiola fails in a first investiture: “It cannot be at the cost of anything.”
Both the manager who has run the organization since the Miguel Ángel Gallardo debacle and Ferraz flatly reject that possibility after the acting regional president said that she had contacted the socialists, something that the PSOE denies. “Guardiola has decided to bet everything on an agreement with the far-right of Vox, the third force. She has chosen and must be consistent,” respond the socialist leadership, which even rules out a meeting with the PP after Guardiola said that “he does not negotiate with this PSOE.”
“Our position has not changed: the PSOE is the alternative to the PP, not the crutch of the right,” these sources add. “The party is not in that,” says a member of the Government, who disdains the words of the mayor of Mérida. That same source does not believe that there will be an electoral repetition in Extremadura and sees in the struggle the typical push and pull of a negotiation in the middle of the electoral cycle. “They are in the game. Guardiola is especially keen,” adds that source: “We are not even dead to abstention.”
However, this absolute rejection is also complicated by the position of the PSOE candidate, Carlos Martínez, who has put Pedro Sánchez’s team in a difficult situation by betting on the most voted list to govern. That is Feijóo’s traditional mantra that the socialists have always rejected because they normally have more partners with whom to reach the Government, despite not winning the elections.
The scenario in Castilla y León is different and the socialists see themselves capable of being in first position given that the PP of Alfonso Fernández Mañueco is very worn out and in that community Vox is especially strong, which can take away votes from the PP. In fact, it was there where the cordon sanitaire on the extreme right was broken for the first time with its entry into the Government in 2022.
Martínez’s strategy blows up Sánchez’s, aware that the PSOE will not be the first force and that, in the best scenario, it will depend on all the left-wing and nationalist partners to continue in Moncloa. In Ferraz they deviate from the proposal: “Each territory has its autonomy and its peculiarities.”
Source: www.eldiario.es
