Alberto Núñez Feijóo turns the investiture debate into a motion of censure against the candidate who has not yet been appointed. Pedro Sánchez responds by sending a central defenseman from Valladolid, yesterday mayor of the city, today, current deputy, to the speaker’s stand. The candidate entered the chamber with the issue of Catalonia as a figurehead and the acting president of the Spanish Government belittled him by delegating to a mayoral candidate who was the most voted in his city in the last municipal elections and he could not be re-elected due to a pact between the Popular Party and Vox.
Puente distributed firewood. This was the assignment. Dislocated, Feijóo took on a cosmic anger. From there the debate was scrapped. At times, the president of the Congress, Francina Armengol, had difficulty getting the debate on track. The relationship between the Popular Party and the PSOE is at its lowest point in recent years.
First word: amnesty. Second word: self-determination. The candidate wanted to start with a bang. Having just started, he pretended to accept the demands of Junts per Catalunya and Esquerra Republicana, to immediately add: “I will not defend this”.
The candidate launched a motion of censure against the candidate who has not yet been appointed. For the first time since 1977, the investiture debate was transformed into something else. And Sánchez, in the afternoon, contributed with his deliberate silence.
In the Catalan opening there were also harsh messages. The candidate announced the inclusion in the Penal Code of a new crime of “constitutional disloyalty”, whose content and delimitation he did not explain. He also proposed a stiffening of the penalties for the crime of embezzlement. He said nothing about the restoration of the old crime of sedition.
“If I had wanted, I would have had the votes for the investiture”, affirmed Núñez Feijóo. This is one of the main frameworks of his speech this week. If the popular candidate for the presidency of the Government had made the slightest concession to the Catalan sovereignists and Basque nationalism, he would have automatically lost the support of the 33 deputies of Vox and probably would have had a fire inside his party, that fire that claims the radio operator Federico Jiménez Losantos when he states in his morning harangues that “you must enter Genoa with a flamethrower”.
Vox is today the elephant in the room of the Spanish conventional right. He can do nothing without them. With Vox, the Popular Party does not have an absolute majority, and without Vox it is 38 deputies short of that majority. With Vox, he has committed to govern, in coalition or through parliamentary support, in the Valencian Community, Aragon, the Balearic Islands, Cantabria, Murcia and Extremadura, as well as in dozens of councils. With Vox, he has embarked on a European-wide operation to facilitate a greater approximation of the European People’s Party to several far-right parties loyal to the Atlantic Alliance, a strategy that Manfred Weber, president of the EPP, is currently revising, precisely in view of the recent electoral results in Spain.
In the afternoon, the candidate tried to be nice to Vox, which in his initial speech he had mildly described as a “unitary party”. Santiago Abascal was also kind to him. The message that the far-right party wanted to send to the entire conservative electorate is the following: unconditional support at a time of national emergency. It’s a smart choice. Vox is now exploring new territories. Under the guidance of Jorge Buxadé, he has just launched a campaign against a major supermarket chain whose advertising supports the 2030 agenda, adopted by the UN in 2015.
After the first part of his speech, dedicated to galvanizing his electorate (8.1 million citizens) and avoiding any doubts about his rejection of any form of commitment to independence, Feijóo detailed his government proposals, with a certain profusion of social democratic goldsmithing. The candidate promises to lower personal income tax, lower VAT on main foods, but also wants to raise the SMI to 60% of the average salary, make working hours more flexible, improve the coverage of the minimum vital tax and maintain the current benefits to deal with inflation and the increase in fuels. The leader of the PP wants less taxes, he wants to maintain, and even expand, the social democratic social shield, and at the same time he wants to comply with the fiscal rules of the EU, which are under review. In Brussels they must have listened to him attentively.
Feijóo addresses the electorate of the left saying that it will not harm them materially. No word on pensions that could trigger the alarm. It also addresses the material interests of the voters of the Basque Nationalist Party and Junts per Catalunya with the following question: “Did they vote for them to implement Podemos’ economic policy?”. Priority for material interests. It is an almost Marxist approach. It’s an encircling maneuver.
A strategy that we could define as the Anti-Japanese United Front, borrowing an expression used a few years ago by Rodríguez de la Borbolla, former president of the Andalusian Council. An admirer of Chinese history, Rodríguez de la Borbolla defended a few years ago a united front against Catalan independence that emulated the anti-Japanese front that was formed in China in 1937 with a provisional alliance of the Chinese Communist Party with the Kuomitang nationalists. First they fought the common enemy together and then they fought each other. He won the party of Mao Zedong.
In the proposal of the former Andalusian president, the Japanese were the Catalan secessionists. In Feijóo’s strategy, the Japanese is Sánchez.
Yolanda Díaz did not take the word either. For Sumar, the new spokeswoman, Marta Lois, from Galicia, spoke first. Gentle manners, teacherly speech. The language of Podemos, excluded from the representations of Sumar, was not present yesterday in Congress for the first time in eight years. Óscar Puente’s tones were the most purple yesterday. Feijóo has pending accounts with Yolanda Díaz, pending accounts that come from Galicia, and yesterday it became clear.
The rapidity of the debate after the irruption of Puente on the podium allowed ERC and Junts to take the floor, who expressed themselves almost entirely in Catalan. Gabriel Rufián defended the amnesty and claimed the role of his party in the negotiated way. Míriam Nogueras spoke of “historic commitment”, called for a referendum in Catalonia referring to article 92 of the Constitution and said that “everything has changed” with Junts’ entry into the scene.
Feijóo’s reply: “They spoke clearly. After hearing his interventions, it is clear why Sánchez did not want to speak. Either you are lying, or Sánchez is lying.”
-” Is there nothing left of Convergence and Union?”, he asked.
Núñez Feijóo proved that he is an effective parliamentary speaker. He controls data well, is incisive, dangerous in retorts and masterfully plays with half-truths. He wanted to attack Sánchez and he belittled him. The day began with the amnesty and ended by talking about Óscar Puente.
Normality in the use of languages. No one will pull him back.
