The harshness with which Santiago Abascal, VOX's candidate, expressed himself against the pro-independence movement, promising the implementation of a tough 155 article, which allows the Madrid government to impose its own power over any autonomous region, has distorted the campaign of “conciliation” and “cordiality” through which the People's Party's (PP) candidate, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, wants his party to emerge from its residual status in the four Catalan constituencies. So much so that the PP leader rejected the “sustained” and “lasting” intervention proposed by VOX in Catalonia, as a response to “worse” situations, which the extremists foresee should Feijóo and Abascal unseat Pedro Sánchez. In an interview on La Sexta, the PP presidential candidate guaranteed “lowering tensions, talking to everyone and complying with the Spanish Constitution throughout the national territory, whether in Catalonia, Andalusia, Castile-La Mancha or the Basque Country”.
Feijóo is making an effort to send messages of moderation to Catalonia in the face of Abascal's outburst. “My job as president will be to reduce tension, to unite society, not to fracture it, not to divide it and not to stress it”, said Feijóo, who said that “neither will I submit to minorities that want to break the laws”, referring to the parliamentary alliances of this legislature between the PSOE, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) and EH Bildu. This is the PP's response to Abascal's proposal, who shook up the campaign this Tuesday by criticising “the 155 joke” that, in the extremist leader's opinion, Mariano Rajoy agreed to with Pedro Sánchez and Albert Rivera in 2017, after the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (DUI). Vox sees the PP as too soft.
Feijóo denies the referendum to Junqueras and Otegi: “We cannot do it”.
The parliamentary tandem ERC-Bildu, which is running in coalition for the Senate, has put on the table in the second week of the campaign —first in Durango and then in Barcelona— a simultaneous double referendum on self-determination in Catalonia and the Basque Country. Oriol Junqueras and Arnaldo Otegi defended it as a joint solution. But the proposal was immediately derailed by Feijóo, who reminded the two pro-independence leaders that “the referendum does not fit in the Spanish Constitution, in the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia nor in the European Union”. “We cannot do that”, said the People's Party's leader on La Sexta, where he insisted that his proposal is to “reinstate the crime of sedition, increase the penalties for embezzlement of public funds and classify the crime of illegal referendum in the Penal Code”. “It is the most logical and clarifying thing to do”.
In parallel, Feijóo justified his absence from tonight's debate on Radio Televisión Española (RTVE), Spain's largest state-owned media, by Pedro Sánchez's pacts with the Catalan and Basque pro-independence supporters. The PP candidate defends that “Junqueras and Otegi”, as Pedro Sánchez's partners, “should be in the debate”. Faced with the ideas of ERC and Bildu, Feijóo considers that “Sánchez would have to explain what he wants to do and explain why they are his partners”, as well as describing the programme being broadcast at 10 pm as a “semi-debate”.