Alberto Núñez Feijóo has made the Senate a fort. He is not going to limit himself to appearing and confronting Pedro Sánchez once a month. The president of the PP wants to take his parliamentary work very seriously and direct from there the work of the PP groups in both chambers. The mere arrival of him has raised interest in the activity of the Upper House, but the bet of the popular leader does not stop there. Because Feijóo has crowded the national leadership of his party of senators. More than there has ever been.
In the new organizational chart of the PP there are 33 leaders. Of them, no less than 14, from the Senate. 12 already have minutes and two, Elías Bendodo and Juan Bravo, will be appointed as soon as the Andalusian legislature begins, as confirmed in the PP-A. In this way, six of the nine main positions in the party are senators: the president, number three (Bendodo), the parliamentary spokesman (Javier Maroto) and the deputy secretaries of Economy (Bravo), Organization (Miguel Tellado) and Autonomous Coordination and Local (Pedro Rollan).
Rollán is the only one of the six who was elected by the direct vote of the Spaniards; in his case, from Madrid. The other five are in the Upper House thanks to the quota reserved for direct appointments from the regional parliaments. Not in vain, placing leaders in the Upper House lightens the economic cost for the party of signing leaders from other territories to work in Madrid. “And the coffers are as they are,” management sources point out.
The other eight senators from Genoa are Jaime de los Santos (Secretary of Culture), Patricia Rodríguez (Family and Equality), Sofía Acedo (Affiliation and Participation), Antonio Román (Municipal Politics), Ana Alós (Provincial Politics), Jorge Martínez ( Agriculture), José Vicente Marí (Industry, Tourism and Commerce) and José Antonio Monago, president of the Rights and Guarantees Committee of the PP.
The 14 senators from Genoa represent the largest number known to date. It is 42% of the organizational chart. Four out of 10. Of course, the president of the PP had never been a member of the Upper House. Yes, AP leader Antonio Hernández Mancha was.
By contrast, in the organizational chart there are only seven deputies of Congress (with Cuca Gamarra and the deputy secretary Carmen Navarro at the head) and three MEPs: Dolors Montserrat (spokesperson for the popular Spanish in Brussels), Esteban González Pons (Institutional deputy secretary) and Gabriel Mato (Foreign Secretary). In Genoa there are three positions from the Xunta, two from the Community of Madrid, one from the Region of Murcia, another from the City Council of the capital and two external ones (one is Carmen Fúnez, a former senator).
Feijóo has not only surrounded himself with senators due to the more territorial and “decentralized” bias that he wants to confer on the PP, but also because the team that Pablo Casado left in the Parliamentary Group of the Congress there are hardly any profiles with the manager stamp and the government experience that the new popular leader was looking for. Two of the most outstanding in this sense have been placed on the staff: the former minister and former president of Congress Ana Pastor -Secretary of Health, her speciality- and the veteran deputy José Antonio Bermúdez de Castro, to whom he has also given a new position as institutional coordinator in the Lower House.
But in the Senate there is a voice that emerges strongly, beyond those appointed, that of Javier Arenas, former Vice President of the Government and one of the greatest heavyweights in the organic history of the PP. As deputy spokesperson, Arenas has immediately taken a leading role, coordinating the Andalusians. With Casado at the helm, Maroto did not have an Andalusian deputy next to him, due to the tensions between that leadership of Genoa and the leaders of the PP-A. And now Feijóo fully trusts the former Labor Minister, who was one of the few people with whom he spoke on 19-J.
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