The PP candidate for the Presidency of the Government, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, faces the campaign with a strategy designed to contest the vote on different fronts and with different objectives depending on the territory.
An intention that is already reflected in the start of the electoral journey with the election of Badalona, Madrid, Santiago de Compostela, Santander, Lleida and Pamplona as the first places chosen. The PP will combine provinces in which it identifies room for electoral growth with others in which it intends to mobilize to maintain its results and some in which it seeks to demonstrate the strength of the sum of the right against the PSOE bloc and the nationalists. Planning that also includes monitoring the evolution of internal surveys on a daily basis to adapt its priorities and concentrate its efforts where the surveys detect the greatest room for action.
If the results of the 2023 elections are taken as a reference, the PP is risking the possibility of winning or losing a seat in 28 constituencies. And three of them have been chosen locations for the start of the campaign: Madrid this Friday, Santander on Sunday and Lleida on Monday. Thus, the campaign will have several fronts in which Feijóo will combine mobilization, growth and confrontation with Pedro Sánchez; although Genoa will adapt the trips of the popular leader based on the daily demoscopy with the premise of "not leaving any vote for fighting." Attention will also be focused on the smaller constituencies, where small variations in the distribution of the last seats can be decisive for the composition of Congress and for the size of the majority that the polls give to the sum of PP and Vox.
Among the places where the popular appreciate the capacity for growth is Catalonia, which has become one of Feijóo's big electoral bets after verifying the margin left by the results of the last national elections. Hence, he chose Badalona (Barcelona) for the traditional hanging of posters as the official opening of the campaign; and that he will move back to the Catalan community on Monday to visit Lleida. Feijóo was four seats short in 2023 to achieve the absolute majority he needed to govern. Two of those deputies could have arrived from Catalonia: in Girona they lacked 366 votes to take a seat from Junts and in Lleida they needed 3,502 more ballots to challenge the PSOE for its second deputy.
Another of the constituencies where the popular ones believe they can fight for the last seat is Cantabria, where Feijóo will be this Sunday, specifically in Santander. The province distributes five seats in Congress and in the 2023 elections the distribution was divided between two representatives for the PSOE, two for the PP and one for Vox. The Popular Party was just 400 votes away from getting a third deputy at the expense of Santiago Abascal, which would have left the PP with three of the five Cantabrian representatives. "We are disputing seats and we are going to fight vote by vote," they say from Genoa.
As he did on October 10, when Feijóo started his pre-campaign in a massive event in the capital, the popular leader also wanted to begin the final stretch towards 29-N in Madrid with an event this Friday together with Isabel Díaz Ayuso and young people. In this constituency, which distributes 37 seats, the objective is to defend the representation obtained in 2023: the PP then achieved 16 deputies compared to the PSOE's ten, but the socialists could snatch one of them. Madrid thus becomes another of the scenarios where Genoa wants to avoid losses of representation, in a campaign in which Pedro Sánchez has also reserved an important role for the capital, where he plans to close his electoral journey. The PP's strategy is clear: a diversified agenda that provides uncertainty to the rival and makes it difficult to anticipate where it will focus its attention. "We will generally go to provinces with seats at stake, although sometimes we will do the opposite to mislead the opponent," they maintain.
Within the PP's strategy of contrasts, the candidate will also go to territories where he seeks to project an image of strength and symbolism, reinforce the mobilization of his electorate and exhibit political muscle. This is the case of Santiago de Compostela, where he goes this Saturday. The Galician capital has a special meaning for the popular leader: it was the place from where on March 2, 2022, Feijóo formally announced his decision to present his candidacy for the national presidency of the Popular Party after the internal crisis that ended the leadership of Pablo Casado. It is a place that "has psychology", popular sources admit. Added to this is its particular municipal political map: Vox does not have representation in the City Council and the PSOE was behind the BNG in votes in the last elections.
Pamplona will be another of the symbolic settings, although for a different reason. There Feijóo wants to project another of the main axes of his campaign: present the unity of the forces of the right as an alternative to the PSOE bloc and the nationalist and independence parties. Following the agreement between the PP and the Navarro People's Union (UPN) to participate in a coalition on November 29, the objective is to "claim that the united right is stronger to confront nationalism, independence and, above all, parties like Bildu."
The slogan in Genoa is not to give up any vote for lost. To achieve this, the PP will combine traditional events with interviews, appearances in different media and communication formats, while monitoring its internal surveys daily to detect where Feijóo's presence can be most effective. A flexible campaign, with different messages and scenarios, in which the agenda will not be completely closed.
