The president of the Popular Party and candidate for the presidency has a precise biography, especially in his private life. Alberto Núñez Feijóo appears, above all, as a shy man. Too much for Pablo Motos and El Hormiguero?
Alberto Núñez Feijóo and his royal partner, Eva Cárdenas, at the Princess of Asturias Awards in Oviedo, in 2018. /gtres
Alberto Núñez Feijóo and his royal partner, Eva Cárdenas, at the Princess of Asturias Awards in Oviedo, in 2018. / GTRES
Elena de los Ríos
ELENA DE LOS RÍOS
Wednesday, 28 June 2023, 15:10 PM.
We can read Alberto Núñez Feijóo (sixty one years old) from the parameters of ‘Galicianness’ and attribute to this that characteristic sometimes parsimonious discretion. It would be a mistake, of course, because the northern character gives for much more than that cliché. The president of the Partido Popular and candidate for l. A. Presidency appears to us, above all, as a cautious and, by extension, shy man. Perhaps Pablo Motos can break this iron circumstance in El Hormiguero. It will be difficult.
The saturation of political messages at election time results in fatigue, especially if they have the contentious nature that we are suffering today. In that broth, the details about the private life of Alberto Núñez Feijóo acquire a plus of interest because the leader of the Popular Party offers very few details about it. What do we know about the candidate? Little but fascinating. We would like Pablo Motos to elaborate more on El Hormiguero.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo was the town nerd.
The experience of the child Alberto is very connected to rural Spain and small towns, as he spent his childhood in Os Peares. It is a precise place, as it is divided between two provinces, Lugo and Orense, and four municipalities. It includes three judicial districts, two dioceses, three regions and three rivers: Miño, Sil and Búbal. For this reason, two power plants have been located there since the 1940s.
Os Peares is known for this administrative absurdity that, in the end, has condemned the neighbors to all kinds of administrative nonsense. A lot of circumspection is required to relate bureaucratically in this place, a characteristic that Alberto Núñez Feijóo possesses. There he was called ‘the grandson of the angels Eladia’, because his grandmother technology a real celebrity in Os Peares. Her business was a cohesive element among so much dispersion: she ran a grocery and tobacco store. Her grandfather, Manolo, was a baker.
D.R.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s grandparents had the means, but without throwing rockets: they raised eight children. His parents, Sira and Saturnino (who died in July 2016, at the age of 83) also struggled to raise their two children, Alberto and Micaela. In fact, the first-born and now president of the Popular Party could not pursue his dream, to become a judge, because his father was out of work and had to help at home.
Despite the straits, the family made an effort and sent an adolescent Alberto to study in León, at the Champagnat boarding school run by the Marist Brothers and recently opened in 1969. Fran Balado tells the story in ‘El viaje de Feijóo. El niño de aldea que nunca perdió unas elecciones’ (La esfera de los libros, 2021), where he also highlights that Mariano Rajoy also passed through the classrooms of a religious school in León, in his case of the Jesuits.
Ñúñez Feijóo could not become a judge, his initial vocation.
At the age of 18, after finishing high school, Alberto Núñez Feijóo moved to Santiago de Compostela to study law, which, according to Balado, he did with average brilliance. We have already said that the economic effort involved in preparing for the competitive examinations to become a judge broke his first vocation. For this reason, in 1985 he took another competitive examination, this time for the Senior Corps of the General Administration in the Xunta de Galicia. In just two months he passed them. He was number two, behind Carlos Negreira, future mayor of A Coruña.
Soon, Feijóo caught the attention of the political authorities and since 1991 he went on to link one shipment after another: popular technical secretary of the Department of Agriculture, Livestock and Forestry; popular secretary of the Department of Health and Social Services; vice president and general secretary of the Galician Health Service; president of Insalud; president of Correos y Telégrafos; minister of Territorial Policy, Public Works and Housing; vice president and president of the Xunta de Galicia.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo with his only son, Alberto.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo with his only son, Alberto. / D.R.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s younger sister, Micaela (fifty three), has also had a brilliant career in business: she is director of Eulen for Northwest Spain. Eloina Núñez, Micaela and Alberto’s cousin, is director of health in the Santiago de Compostela area.
Feijóo’s sentimental life was the great mystery.
All in all, it is the angels v
