“Historical commitment” and “amnesty”. This Wednesday was the respective bet of the Basque groups EH-Bildu and PNV in the investiture session of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, to whom both have denied support. Although the PNV spokesperson, Aitor Esteban, reproached the PP for its alliance with the far-right Vox, for the leader of the nationalist group, Mertxe Aizpurua, the Vox and PP projects are basically identical and reactionary.
“This is the historic commitment that we have come to propose, a historic commitment to lift the mortgages that still weigh on our nations and on the working majorities,” Aizpurua closed his intervention, calling for the responsibility of all to assume a deepening of democracy and complete what the transition left unfinished. “There are many pending tasks.” “EH Bildu is willing, we hope we all are,” she concluded.
Previously, Aizpurua had explained the commitment of the nationalist party to progressive policies aimed at the social majorities of both Euskadi and the rest of the State and showed off his party’s support for the progress made by the coalition government in the previous legislature. starting with the social shield with which the effects of the pandemic were alleviated.
In this sense, Aizpurua stressed that Vox and PP are part of the same reactionary coalition and stated that “this week we will invest Mr. Feijóo as leader of the opposition” and, consequently, he added, “we will open the phase so that you, Mr. Sánchez , achieve sufficient support for his investiture.” Bildu recalled that the acting president “knows that to do so he must listen to and attend to the demands of Basques and Catalans, he must give constructive responses to the national and social claims of our people and their social and working majorities.”
And he underlined the weight of the territories of Euskadi, Catalonia and Galicia in the opinion of 23-J: “Without the Basque, Catalan and Galician sovereign left, this State would simply be governed today by the extreme right; do not forget”.
The PNV spokesperson, Aitor Esteban, for his part, reproached Núñez Feijóo for his political alliance with Vox as an insurmountable reason to support his investiture and mocked the PP’s alleged renunciation of achieving a government that is not within its reach, because any agreement with PNV and Junts would imply the rejection of thirty votes from the extreme right of Vox. “That’s the whale in the pool.”
Esteban stressed that the incompatibility of the Jeltzale formation with Vox transcends the Spanish territorial debate and reaches the role of Spain in a Europe where the weight of authoritarian formations is growing and would cause deep concern and bring serious consequences for Spain if the country’s government opened up to the extreme right, like the PP, he recalled, has done in as many autonomous communities and city councils as it has had the opportunity.
In any case, to the alliance with Vox, Esteban added other reasons for the negative vote for the candidate condensed in the sense of the votes of the popular group in the previous legislature and in many aspects of the PP’s electoral program of July 23. And Esteban summarized: “If, as Mrs. Cuca Gamarra says, here the choice is between Feijóo and amnesty, well, hey, if things are put like this, amnesty.”
Of course, Esteban met for a possible future understanding with Núñez Feijóo. He did so by reminding him that politics is a marathon, not a sprint, and that, although sometimes it is appropriate to sprint, those who sprint throughout the race are usually ephemeral “as we have had the opportunity to see in this House,” he noted in a veiled allusion to young people. disappeared from politics in record time, like Pablo Casado, Albert Rivera or Pablo Iglesias.
Feijóo grouped the responses to the two Basque groups, as he had done on Tuesday with the Catalan groups – something that bothered Aitor Esteban – and responded to EH-Bildu giving it the literal treatment of a terrorist band. The candidate considered it a pride that the Abertzales did not vote for his investiture and remembered again and again the victims of ETA. He also dedicated arrows when addressing the PNV, about whose loss of votes against Bildu he ironically and whom he accused of having bowed to the strategies of the PSOE and Podemos for the benefit of the Abertzales.
Feijóo’s response made Esteban return to the podium when “I was thinking of answering him from the bench.” Spokesman Jeltzale recalled, regarding the PNV’s support for the coalition government, the numerous occasions on which, in Congress itself during the previous legislature, the PP had voted alongside EH-Bildu and ERC. But “as I have told you and you have repeated, this is a marathon and we will continue talking, but today you have made more friends,” he snapped.
