There were ten hours until Alberto Núñez Feijóo took the stage and six before the sun rose when the first buses left Huelva in direction to Madrid. Nearly 200 coaches coming from all points of Spain They collaborated in the overflow of expectations that made the event held in Felipe II the most massive event of a political party in recent decades. An event that bore the organizational seal of the Popular Party, but was attended by sympathizers, activists and voters of other acronyms in defense of “legality”, “equality between Spaniards” and against the amnesty that turned the event into a hybrid between the rally and the concentration of protesters of all stripes.
“I vote for Vox and here I am,” he assures this newspaper Martawhich together with Gregorio y María, all family, attends the event from the Madrid district of Villaverde. “This is where the lies have brought us,” admits Gregorio, who defends that anyone, despite it being a PP event, participates in the protest: “Any good citizen should be there.” They affirm that they will attend the demonstration on October 8 in Barcelona.
In Genoa, aware that the attendance figure was up to five times higher than estimated, they expressed their chests for the party’s convening power, but they also thanked the rest of the groups that will support Feijóo’s investiture for their gesture and commitment. Among them, the 33 deputies of Vox, a formation with which the PP will share a demonstration on October 8 in Barcelona.
But this Sunday there were not only PP or Vox voters at the event. The call from the critical sector of the PSOE with Pedro Sánchez -led by Alfonso Guerra and Felipe González – not agreeing on an amnesty with the independence movement has led “lifelong socialists” to take to the streets in protest. It is the case of Ceciliafrom a family with a socialist tradition in Valencian Communityo María, who claims to have been a “PSOE voter”, but that Pedro Sánchez’s roadmap, “willing to be president at any cost”, has taken them to the Plaza de Felipe II. Others waited to know the degree of importance of the call, but they took little time to join the meeting: “We decided it from minute one.”
Many of those gathered carried Spanish and, above all, regional flags to demand equality between regions. Fewer, and more concentrated in the part closest to the stage, were the blue flags of the PP, many distributed by the party itself. “This is not a political issue,” explains a group that came from Zalamea la Real (Huelva)which summarizes like no other the reason that led them to take to the streets of Madrid: “For Spain.”