Alberto Nunez Feijoo: The mild-mannered moderate who wants to be Spain’s PM

MADRID – Mr Alberto Nunez Feijoo, whose right-wing Popular Party won Spain’s snap election but without support to form a government, has built his reputation on being a moderate but struggled to square the circle of an alliance with the far right.

A native of Galicia in the rural northwest, the 61-year-old had hoped his moderate stance and dull-but-dependable brand would win over the electorate during Spain’s snap election.

And almost all the polls concurred, while indicating Mr Feijoo’s right-wing party would most certainly need support from the far-right Vox to govern.

So Mr Feijoo turned his sights on Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez with a campaign focused on “overthrowing Sanchismo” which would upend many of the Socialist leader’s policies, while promising he would be a steady hand on the tiller.

Mr Sanchez, by contrast, staked everything on warning about the dangers of a PP-Vox government.

And the strategy appeared to work: although Mr Feijoo’s PP won, it fell far short of the numbers expected and was unable to form a majority, even with the support of Vox.

A bitter pill

It was a bitter pill for a politician who until 2022 spent all his political career in Galicia, where he was first elected regional leader in 2009 with an absolute majority – a feat he would go on to repeat three more times.

When he took over as head of the PP in April 2022, he was hailed as a pragmatic moderate and a safe pair of hands to lead a party recovering from one of the worst internal crises in its history.

“Feijoo is very predictable, he likes to show off his transparency and present himself as a reliable, trustworthy politician,” said Mr Fran Balado, a Galician journalist and author of the book “Feijoo’s Journey” (2021).

“He’s a moderate because he manages to attract progressive voters and he’s a pragmatist whom people trust,” he told AFP.

In the weeks leading up to the vote, questions resurfaced about Mr Feijoo’s ties with Marcial Dorado, a notorious tobacco smuggler involved in extensive money laundering who was later convicted for drug trafficking.

The issue first came up in 2013 after El Pais published photos of them in the mid-90s on Dorado’s boat and on holiday in Ibiza and the Canary Islands when Mr Feijoo headed Galicia’s health service.

At the time, Mr Feijoo said he “knew nothing about (Dorado’s) activities”, insisting they didn’t have “a close friendship”.

But fellow Galician Yolanda Diaz, head of the radical-left Sumar, challenged his assertion of innocence just before the vote, saying: “Tell us what you were doing with Marcial Dorado when all of Spain knew who he was.”