Alberto Núñez Feijóo chose the set of El Hormiguero, seventeen days before the general elections, to tell Spanish Catholics that they should not count on him. The Popular Party candidate assured millions of viewers on Wednesday that the abortion law will remain as it is and that the euthanasia law will receive, at most, a few tweaks. He said it with his soft smile and the tone of a diligent manager that has become his personal brand, without his voice trembling and without anyone forcing him. Feijóo truly believes what he says, and that is the most serious thing of all.
A candidate to the right of no one
Pablo Motos asked him about sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls, who since 2023 can have an abortion behind their parents’ backs. Any leader with a minimum of conviction would have taken the opportunity to denounce one of the most scandalous legal aberrations of sanchismo. Feijóo replied that it is «an open debate,» that it would be enough for parents to know, without needing their consent, and that not even that will be changed «unless there is a consensus.» The man who asks for votes to oust Pedro Sánchez hands Pedro Sánchez the key to his only and miserable proposal on the matter.
The Popular Party demanded by law in 2015 parental consent for those minors. It was the alms that Mariano Rajoy threw to his voters after withdrawing the Gallardón reform and betraying the commitment to repeal the deadline law. To Feijóo that alms seems today an excessive reactionary measure. He finished the job by stating that if a father sees that his daughter has decided to have an abortion, «he has to help her.» The candidate for the presidency of the Government of Spain considers that the duty of a father consists of taking his teenage daughter to the clinic where they will kill his grandson.
He did not speak of the child. In more than an hour of interview, the leader of the main party that claims to defend the family did not find five seconds to mention the victim of each of the one hundred thousand abortions performed each year in Spain. He offered money to mothers without resources, a sensible measure that any pro-lifer would applaud, and used it as an alibi not to move a single article of a law that his own party took to the Constitutional Court in 2010.
Bureaucracy for death
Euthanasia received the same treatment. Feijóo will reform it because «it can produce undesirable effects,» an expression of astonishing coldness in the mouth of someone speaking of patients whose lives the State takes away. He brought up the call he received from Noelia Castillo’s mother and concluded that public services had failed that young woman. He used a mother’s pain to sell an administrative review of a law that the PP also challenged and which it now accepts in its essentials. Feijóo is uncomfortable that the procedure has flaws. That a doctor paid with public money kills a patient seems perfectly acceptable to him.
None of this was a slip. In June, on the same program and with the words of Leo XIV still fresh from his visit to Spain, the president of the PP guaranteed abortion as a right and promised to «perfect» euthanasia, after defining himself as pro-life. It takes a lot of nerve to say all three things in the same night.
Contempt for the Catholic voter
John Paul II admitted in Evangelium vitae that a Catholic politician may support an imperfect law if it reduces the number of abortions and his personal rejection is public and notorious. Feijóo does not even fit into that exception, because he restricts nothing and has never expressed any rejection. Benedict XVI placed the defense of life among the principles that a Catholic cannot negotiate in politics. The Popular candidate has given them away without any return, on a variety show, to scrape together a few centrist votes that he believes are more valuable than those of people who have been supporting his party for forty years.
That is the calculation of Génova, as old as it is cynical: the Catholic will vote for the PP no matter what the PP does, out of fear of the left. Rajoy at least had the decency to lie during the campaign and disappoint later. Feijóo has lost even that decency and announces the capitulation before receiving the vote, convinced that it will cost him nothing. On November 29 he will find out whether Spanish Catholics are still willing to behave like the docile flock he takes for granted, or whether the time has come for the Popular Party to pay at the ballot box for the contempt with which it treats them.