Alberto, If You Keep This Up, We’re Screwed

This column is written from one corner of the political spectrum — the right — not as an act of partisanship, but as a sober warning about a moment of strategic drift that threatens to leave Spain leaderless in purpose, directionless in opposition, and ultimately worse off for it.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo is a serious, cultured, and diligent politician — traits that should be assets for any leader aspiring to give voice to a majority weary of institutional decay and frustrated by the policies of Pedro Sánchez. Yet seriousness alone is not leadership, and Feijóo increasingly resembles a manager concerned more with maintaining party hair-part neatness than with awakening a nation.

Feijóo’s strategy mirrors the technocratic tone of Germany’s Friedrich Merz — measured, orderly, disciplined — but Spain is not Germany, and Spaniards are not won over by technocratic reassurance or charts. They are concerned with identity, confidence, and emotional connection. Replicating a German playbook with the same technocratic gravitas feels out of place and disconnected from the lived reality of Spaniards in Cuenca or Cádiz.

When he unveils immigration measures “with fanfare” lifted straight from the CDU’s playbook, the effect is not strategic resurgence — it’s self-inflicted vote erosion. Feijóo appears to be replicating policies without translation, missing the cultural and emotional grammar his electorate actually speaks. And the polls he leans on — especially the CIS surveys drafted by José Félix Tezanos — are as misleading as they are ubiquitous. Thinking that such instruments accurately measure voter sentiment is, at this stage, almost quixotic.

In distressing irony, Feijóo has recruited advisers such as Iván Redondo — once portrayed as an Iberian Rasputin — whose track record of political victories is, to put it mildly, thin. It’s one thing to consult gurus; it’s another to let them drive strategy while the party base grows impatient and outsiders gain traction.

Indeed, the youth have checked out on Feijóo. Many are drifting not toward him or his tradition of cautious centre-right governance, but toward Vox or away from the ballot box entirely. The right’s challenge is not merely to persuade conservatives — it is to reconnect with a generation that doesn’t watch conventional news or care about old political scripts.

Inside his own party, the contradictions multiply. Some deputies speak of renewal while privately counting down to retirement. Others utter the word “Spain” with all the passion of an accountant reciting VAT figures. Feijóo’s gestures — such as distancing from certain figures without actually stripping them of influence — feel symbolic rather than transformative.

Meanwhile, the far right gains incrementally not because Santiago Abascal is magnetic — he’s not — but because votes are drifting from Feijóo’s camp to Vox, not from Vox to Feijóo. That’s a critical distinction: it is the right-of-centre electorate that grows disillusioned, not the fringes that grow by conquest.

Feijóo talks about people rather than to them. He enumerates policies rather than inspires movements. And while Sánchez manipulates judiciaries, issues pardons for allies, and corrodes the rule of law, Feijóo stands on the sidelines explaining charts that fail to stir passion.

If this pattern continues — if the right continues to present itself with technocratic recitals instead of strategic leadership, if it persuades voters with bullet points instead of emotional resonance — what will happen is clear: the right-of-centre voter will stay home. And when that happens, Spanish politics will be consigned to a perpetual three-thirds division in which the most cunning — not the most competent — governs.

The warning is stark but necessary: Spain needs a leader who speaks to the nation, not just to polling tables. If Feijóo does not adapt, innovate, and connect, the right will remain village commentators while the other side dictates national direction. And that, as the title bluntly asserts, means we’re screwed.