The barons of weight of the PP are measured in May | Spain

On May 28, many parallel battles will be library. The regional and municipal elections will also settle the internal balances in the parties. Despite the fact that the general belief in the PP is that Alberto Núñez Feijóo was lost as Prime Minister in December, the party is also aware that the PP president has warned that if he does not win, he will leave, reopening the succession career. For this reason, in May, the weight barons of the PP, those who get the opportunity could choose to succeed the leader. The only one who at the moment holds the crown of the absolute majority is the Andalusian president, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, whom the PP is going to use in the campaign to help its candidates in at least five autonomous communities. Meanwhile, the other great territorial reference of the PP, the president of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, will try to match the absolute majority of the baron of the south, wrapping himself up with the former presidents José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy.

The president of Andalusia and representative of the moderate soul of the PP will have an intense activity in the campaign. Moreno Bonilla will star in a tour that will take him through at least five regions other than his own, where the presidency is not at stake, but municipal power is. Despite the fact that the Andalusian baron needs to consolidate in the Town Halls the historical turn that he preferred last June by evicting the Socialists from the Junta after 40 years of uninterrupted governments, in the seven weeks remaining until the elections he will travel to Castilla-La Mancha , the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, Extremadura and Madrid, according to sources from the Andalusian PP. Moreno Bonilla’s tour is designed to help the PP candidates in those territories, and a demand has been organized by them or by the national leadership, although at the same time he will relaunch his national projection as one of the main referents of the party.

The Andalusian baron is one of the territorial leaders closest to Feijóo -both consider themselves friends- and also aspires in May to strengthen his dominance of the most populous autonomous community in Spain by trying to get the PP to govern in five of the eight provincial capitals Andalusians, according to Andalusian PP sources. In the party they recognize that Seville and Huelva resist them. The popular will put all the meat on the grill to snatch the capital of the community from the left, the most symbolic square that would consolidate the hegemony of the PP commanded by Moreno Bonilla in the old socialist stronghold.

The Madrid president and main figure of the right-wing hawks will also mark ground in the campaign. Isabel Díaz Ayuso aspires to match the feat of the Andalusian by achieving an absolute majority in Madrid, for which he lacked only four seats in the last elections of 2023. Ayuso held more than forty rallies with a national speech and confronting the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, with whom projection beyond Madrid is guaranteed. But this time, unlike Moreno Bonilla, it is only planned that she will travel to Valladolid to cover the scalable of the PP in the Castilian and Leonese city that is now in the hands of the PSOE.

In the president’s team they explain that she is obliged to “remember her community”, despite the fact that “she has received requests from almost all the provinces to accompany them”. Ayuso, unlike Moreno Bonilla, is now playing his presidency. And in May, according to his direct team, the challenge is more difficult because “mayors throw a lot” and the problem is that whoever chooses the ballot for their socialist mayor has a harder time choosing Ayuso’s. “The regional presidents who go to the elections alone have an advantage,” they explain in the environment of the Madrid leader, who for this reason will also cast the rest in the campaign.

Ayuso aspires to an absolute majority with which to govern without ties and incidentally also consecrate his authoritative internal Although she continues to garner significant popular support on the right and in the PP everyone knows that she is Aznar’s protégé, in the party some barons maintain that, for the purposes of internal balances for the day after the Feijóo era, if he does not get it now “it will be touched”.

The president of Madrid will embrace Aznar and Rajoy in two separate rallies in the final stretch of the campaign, and will share events with Feijóo. Ayuso is not going to spare weapons to reach that bar and has even asked Moreno Bonilla himself to help her in one of the socialist bastions of her community, the municipality of Fuenlabrada, where the PSOE devastated the PP in the 2019 municipal elections with almost five times more votes (49,000 per lot 10,000 of the PP).

Both will star in a meeting hand in hand in that town last week, in which Moreno Bonilla is expected to help Ayuso with his more moderate image to attract socialist voters. One of the two could be the future of the PP and may define in what position they start before that horizon.