PP and Vox reduce the tone of their attacks while defining their differences ahead of the elections

Just six months ago, Vox's number two, IgnacioGarriga, described Alberto Núñez Feijóo and his leadership as a "Galician clan with practices of estuary smugglers." A few days before, the popular leader had commented on Santiago Abascal: "This patriot thing is great for you." At that time, the Vox leader accused the Galician of "trying to tame" his party and treating them as "savages", while Feijóo rejected that the party on his right was going to give him "lessons." The list could go on, since the clash between PP and Vox has been the tone for a good part of this legislature, including its previous one: the campaign for the July 2023 elections. However, now, the two right-wing parties seem to have moved on from the screen and are starting the new path to the polls in a different context, avoiding the harshest attacks.

They also do so having left black on white their discursive coincidences, and the discrepancies that still exist between the two. The pacts sealed this year in four autonomous communities have served to find common ground between both rights on issues as relevant to Vox as immigration, so at the headquarters on Bambú Street they consider that the cards are on the table and citizens already know what each party is proposing. "The debate with the PP is orderly," say sources from the party, who maintain that the Spaniards "know what each of them is asking for," which could lessen the direct clash between the two in the campaign. Although, yes, other Vox sources point out that the fight will not be a complete failure, but that Abascal's party will expose the failures that, in their opinion, are the responsibility of the "bipartisan system."

But, in any case, at this time the clash is predicted to be several decibels below that carried out by PP and Vox on the way to the polls in 2023. The leader of the hard right did not avoid yesterday remembering how, in his opinion, in that campaign "many right-wing media contributed to the demonization of Vox", in a strategy that he considers was "sponsored by the PP." In contrast to this, and after listening to Feijóo's intervention reacting yesterday to the electoral advance, Abascal said he agreed with him "in a large part of the diagnosis." "Probably not in the solutions that are necessary to rebuild Spain," he clarified, although maintaining: "[It is] peccata minuta [little thing] next to what we have in front of us." He thus minimized in public those discrepancies that could cause the clash.

Vox already presented yesterday what will be its nuclear proposals to ask for the support of the Spanish people: "national priority", "deregulation" and "remigration". The party does not fear that the PP will come close to its postulates in these matters, that it will copy them to compete for the electorate, since they consider that in recent months it has become clear how far each party is willing to go in these and other matters. That the voters who could share already know what distinguishes them, and Vox even believes that the communities in which they have closed government agreements with the popular ones can play some role in the campaign. "It falls short for us," party sources say about what they can do in these regions with the citizen support they had at the polls, and thus they slip that this can serve as an argument to ask for "more Vox." A similar idea was even conveyed by Abascal yesterday: "We have reached a good time for the Spaniards, if they want more from Vox, to give us good support, and more things can be done and things can change more forcefully."