La Razón says the PP is concerned that Vox could reach 80 seats: could it prevent this?

There are political parties that are like the famous Schrödinger's cat, which is neither alive nor dead, according to a paradox of quantum mechanics.

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In Spain we could say that we have a Schrödinger party, the Popular Party (PP), which is not right-wing but is right-wing, which is liberal and conservative but is not, which defends life but does not defend it, and so we could continue listing political paradoxes that can be summarized, broadly speaking, in the maxim of acquiring commitments with voters that cease to be valid the day after the elections, a way of doing politics that ends up creating a bad reputation.

This Wednesday, the newspaper La Razón, very close to the PP leadership, leaked a supposed "Feijóo's plan to erase Rajoy's ideological concession". The aforementioned media outlet points out what their accounts in the leadership of that party say: "they assure that to shore up the conservative public, Feijóo "must differentiate himself from the PSOE, or else Vox will end up with eighty seats." And by identifying the PP with the PSOE, Santiago Abascal continues to grow in the polls." La Razón explains that this trend is worrying the leadership of the PP, which is why it has decided to use its favorite hook to attract voters again: promises.

La Razón reports that the PP leadership intends to repeal the amnesty law and the Catalan quota (if approved), reinstate the crime of sedition, and reinstate the old sentences for embezzlement. In the realm of the so-called cultural battle, the PP-affiliated newspaper notes the following about the party's plans:

"In the ideological sphere, it has declared the Democratic Memory Law final, which it intends to replace with a Concord Law. Or the Education Law, a classic of all democratic governments. In the past, it targeted other controversial laws, such as the so-called "only yes is yes" law, whose effects caused havoc with the reduction of sentences for sexual aggressors; or the Trans and Animal Welfare laws."

Significantly, La Razón doesn't say a word about the abortion law, the euthanasia law, or the gender violence law, three laws that violate fundamental rights such as the right to life, the presumption of innocence, and equality before the law. Thus, the PP believes it will be able to attract Vox voters using a cheap hook, avoiding getting involved so as not to lose the center-left voters it also seeks to attract. This is the problem with being Schrödinger's party, which defends one thing and its opposite because, in the end, it's about getting votes even if it means deceiving both sides, running the risk of pissing them both off.

All in all, today I'm going to be good and forget for a moment the anger the PP caused me in 2009 by breaking its promise of "linguistic freedom" made in the Galician elections in March of that year and betrayed nine months later. Despite this, I'm going to show it the easy and difficult way it has to take votes away from Vox.

Of course, it's an easy and difficult path because we're talking about Schrödinger's party. If it were another party with clearer ideas or a history of faithfully fulfilling the promises made to voters, we wouldn't be facing this paradox. The PP only has to do something as simple as demonstrating where it governs what change will be, repealing historical memory laws, gender laws, and aberrations like the Galician language normalization law, which erased Spanish names from official toponymy with a stroke of the pen.

To that we could add pro-life measures like those Vox proposed in 2023 in Castilla y León and which the PP finally rejected, whether out of lukewarmness, cowardice, or because the PP has become as pro-abortion as the left. Let us not forget the parental pin that Vox proposed and the PP rejected, a measure to prevent ideological indoctrination in educational centers, also in regions governed by the PP. In addition, the PP should drastically reduce political spending in the regions where it governs, eliminating a very long collection of subsidies such as the one that has allowed the PP to create a wide clientelist network in Galicia.

Of course, something so politically easy would be very difficult for the PP, because it long ago ceased to be a liberal-conservative party to become just another progressive and social democratic party. A transformation in which its current national president, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has played a very active role. That's why Vox has plenty of room to continue rising in the polls, if only because it has the benefit of the doubt: it hasn't yet had the chance to govern Spain, and that's why we don't know whether it will keep its promises or not.

In the case of the PP, that doubt vanished years ago: it's a party that makes false promises to get votes, laughing at its voters in the hope that four years later many of them will have gotten over their anger. I don't forget 16 years later, and I think it will take me a long time to forget, because among my many faults is not having a bad memory for those who betray their promises.

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Photo: Partido Popular.