The president of the Junta de Andalucía, Juan Manuel Moreno, was re-elected this Saturday at the helm of the party with 99.95% of the votes. After making public the percentage of support achieved, he assured that the PP will win the next regional elections: “I feel so honored that I promise you that I will once again give my all so that this party can once again be the leading force and have a stable majority sufficient for all Andalusians.”
Moreno began the week by presenting his memoirs, Coexistence manual. The Andalusian road, where he defends the path of moderation, against the hyperbole of national politics, as the key that earned him the absolute majority. This Andalusian path began to be called encapsulation from its first term: isolating Andalusia and the coalition government, between Popular and Citizens, with the external support of Vox, from the ups and downs that occurred beyond Despeñaperros and in his own formations. And this is how the 17th regional congress was conceived, as a conclave without fanfare, where we only talk about Moreno’s management and the stability he managed to bring to the community, isolating it from the other major debates that influence its formation: the succession of Carlos Mazón in Valencia and the confirmation that the partner of the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, will be tried for tax fraud and falsification of documents. This isolation also includes the screening crisis, which Moreno only alluded to, in a veiled manner, in the speech presenting his candidacy.
In the previous elections, the leader of the Andalusian PP had asked the Andalusians for a “sufficient majority”, that is, an absolute majority so as not to depend on anyone. He did it. Four years later he will repeat the same message, but now he calls it the “stability majority”. The Andalusian baron has no doubts about his victory, nor any poll, but what he doesn’t know is by how much. It now has 58 seats out of a total of 109, four more than the absolute majority. Everything will depend on how the remnants move in a community with eight constituencies, and what can happen in these eight months until the elections scheduled for June 2026.
Moreno presented his candidacy for re-election as president of the Andalusian PP, a position he accepted 11 years ago, before the plenary session of the XVII Regional Congress to ask his people not to relax. “We must finish what we have started. I ask for your support to consolidate the progress and transformation of Andalusia. Those who believe that this victory has been won are wrong, those who listen to criticism with contempt are wrong”
The popular leader looked back to remember the origins of the Andalusian PP, when the penetration of this party was completely irrelevant in all elections. “We started from the bottom, being from the PP was a social stain, they pointed fingers at you, your business, your family, I’m not talking about prehistory.” For this reason he appealed to the “pride” of being a PP soldier.
The Andalusian popular people are very clear that at the moment only Vox is benefiting from community polarization, the only party that is growing in the polls and not only to the detriment of the popular votes, but also of those disenchanted with the PSOE, according to the almost daily polls managed by Moreno’s team. It is therefore intended that nothing alters the low profile that the congress wants to give. The popular baron himself made it clear this morning when entering the Palace of Exhibitions and Congresses of Seville (Fibes). “Enough politics,” he said when asked about the negotiations between his party and the far right to agree on Mazón’s successor at the helm of the Valencian Generalitat.
By “politicising” in the Andalusian president’s environment we mean political confrontation, noise. In this way Moreno resolved one of the issues that could distort the serene atmosphere of his congress. The other: the presence of Díaz Ayuso, which she herself deactivated by announcing that she would not be able to go to Seville due to a “slight indisposition”. The presence of the president of the Community of Madrid was undoubtedly the highlight of the conclave, with the permission of Alberto Núñez-Feijóo, in charge of closing it on Sunday – she herself was in charge throughout this week of underlining that she was, together with her counterpart from Murcia, Fernando López Miras, the only regional president who would have supported Moreno -, even more so when her speech would have taken place the day after the National Court had confirmed that her partner would participate on the bench for his alleged crimes against the Treasury.
That the news programs opened with their words and not with the congress is something that bothered the Andalusian PP, precisely because it added decibels to that noise that they are trying to attenuate. We still remember how, in the previous regional congress in Granada, it was his speech, in which he asked Moreno to “fly free”, in clear allusion to who was then the president of the party, Pablo Casado, that imposed a change of pace around the Andalusian leader who had to underline in public and private that Juanma was independent.
With this congress, the Andalusian PP wants to strengthen Moreno’s managerial profile, impacting the stability he managed to bring to Andalusia, thanks to the absolute majority, in the face of the weakness of the central government. But not only that. The Andalusian popular want to warn that without this majority stability is in danger, making it dependent on Vox. The Andalusian president himself abandoned this idea on Monday during the presentation of his memoirs: “The Andalusians are not aware of what they have. Approving budgets every year, approving laws, decrees, selling stability and trust would be much more difficult to do and I am referring to our neighbors in Extremadura”, he said referring to the electoral progress in that community because Vox has decided not to support the budgets.
This stability has been shaken in the last month due to the screening crisis, an issue that has so far not been discussed in the regional congress until Moreno mentioned it, albeit in a veiled way in his speech. As he has done since the scandal broke, he insisted that his government knows how to apologize and that it is working to reform the system. “The public health system works, with its difficulties and its room for improvement, but it works. We are aware that all the resources allocated to healthcare will never be enough. I guarantee you that we will make all the necessary reforms so that the system works 100%”.
The entourage of the Andalusian president is confident that the screening crisis will begin to deflate as soon as all affected women have had their second mammogram and it is ensured that the failures will not be repeated and they are also convinced that this problem does not permeate the entire Andalusian society, not even all users of the Andalusian Health System, but those who are actually affected by breast cancer.
Even Miguel Tellado, general secretary of the PP, protagonist this Saturday morning, did not refer to the screening crisis, after Ayuso was discharged due to illness. His harsh and bellicose tone did not disappoint. It looked like a cat scratching a wall. Tellado attacked the Andalusian PSOE for the ERE scandal to seamlessly link it to cases of alleged corruption in the national PSOE and link both phases with the first vice president and candidate for the Council of Andalusian Socialists, María Jesús Montero. “She is the living image of political corruption,” he said of the Finance Minister, since first “she was part of the ERE governments” of the PSOE in Andalusia and now of Pedro Sánchez’s executive. “It has been a constant crossroads of corruption,” he stressed.
But this was not the kind of speech the Andalusian PP wanted to hear. Montero is not the main threat to Moreno’s absolute majority right now, and corruption, those around Moreno insist, is an issue that doesn’t give votes to those who raise it. More sympathetic was Murcia’s president, López Miras, who told Vox: “Those on our right spend more time criticizing us than the PSOE or Montero in Andalusia, we know what the campaign will be like.”
Moreno took advantage of the conclave to sell around 200 copies of his book.
