Unlike Pedro Sánchez, who needs the affirmative vote of Junts, Alberto Núñez Feijóo would have had enough with the abstention of Carles Puigdemont’s party to be sworn in as president. For this reason, if a month ago the demand for an amnesty for the leaders of the process frustrated the approach to the pro-independence formation, looking to the future he hopes to normalize relations, “from the discrepancy”, with Catalan nationalism by don’t be left with honey on your lips again.
The leader of the PP acknowledged yesterday in Barcelona, ??at a Forum Europa event, that there were talks – “They wanted to talk together and it was my responsibility to contact them”, he explained -, but the amnesty cliff , a “political transaction” that Sánchez does assume to be able to continue in Moncloa, as he denounced, he found it “immoral” and insurmountable: “No one in the legal system and it cannot be negotiated because it is illegal legal”, he concluded.
“In a normal democracy, the convicted do not write the Penal Code, nor the lawyers of the accused, the amnesties”, he warned, although this did not prevent him from appreciating Puigdemont’s sincerity: “Everyone knows what he is asking for, there are others who lie a lot”, he pointed out after assuring that “Catalonia needs the revolution of truth”.
Nevertheless, he opened the door to a close understanding and placed in the Tinell Pact, which twenty years ago isolated the PP of Catalonia from any governing equation, the origin of what President José Montilla – whom he thanked for went to his conference – he called it “disaffection” towards Spain.
“I don’t need them to explain to me the importance of maintaining Catalan as the most important sign of culture in this town”, he said, flaunting his Galicianism, but that does not mean that Spanish is the common language of Spaniards, therefore , understands that deputies who use it naturally in the corridors of Congress should not put on a headset to understand each other in the chamber.
After appealing to PSC voters to remind them that on 23-J they gave victory to a party that negotiates “the opposite” of what it promised then, and to Junts, whom he asked if they agreed with the “radical” policy of Podem, Feijóo set himself the goal, if he becomes president of the Spanish Government, that Catalonia “returns to compete as Spain’s economic engine”.
“I don’t know if the Junts militants will be fine with the economic, social, public services, fiscal and industrial policy of Sumar and the PSOE”, argued the conservative leader in front of an audience with a notable business presence. And he unearthed a series of data that illustrate the decline he attributes to the years of pro-independence governments in matters of health, education, housing, tourism, transport and industry. “Catalonia has taken a turn for the worse”, he said.
As an alternative, Feijóo proposed his usual recipe for a generalized tax cut that would contribute to boosting the economy without reducing revenue or harming social investment, because activity would be accelerated in a virtuous loop. In other words, the same for the Catalonia of tomorrow as for the Madrid of today.
On a more philosophical level, and as an antidote to the territorial tensions that have frustrated his chances of forming a government, he assured that “concrete problems unite, while abstract or artificial ones separate”. With this vindication of the management of reality in the face of the uncertainties of independence, Feijóo wanted to convince Catalans of “moderate mentality” to return to the sanity of the governments of the old CiU, whose public services, he recalled, he had admired at the beginning of his career.
As a last resort to seduce his own – including his head of ranks in Catalonia, Alejandro Fernández, opposed to the approach to Junts – and strangers, he affirmed that the one who would make the support of Junts profitable to the PSOE and Sumar would not be Junts, but the PSC or also ERC.
