“The fans are delighted,” they celebrated in the Moncloa after the surprising blow that Pedro Sánchez delivered to the investiture debate of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, by giving the turn of reply to his most aggressive and combative spokesperson, the deputy Óscar Puente, former mayor. of Valladolid, whose unexpected and forceful intervention, they claimed, left the leader of the Popular Party “dislocated” and his entire bench “very angry.”
Instead of defending their political program and their country project, in Moncloa they regretted that Feijóo “came to give a rally for his people”, based on the attack against Sánchez’s investiture as in the PP event on Sunday in Madrid, so they responded with “another rally for our people.” And the institutionality? “We already saw it with the PP deputies shouting ‘coward’ at the president,” they reproached. “The PP has lost its way,” they concluded. Mission, therefore, accomplished.
Óscar Puente has – in the opinion of Sánchez’s small hard core who kept the surprise a secret – the most appropriate profile to put the leader of the PP “in front of the mirror of all his contradictions.” And blow up the “house of cards” of Feijóo’s plea for him to govern the most voted list.
And Puente was the candidate with the most votes in the municipal elections on May 28 in Valladolid, the capital of which he had been mayor since 2015. But the alliance of the PP and Vox evicted him. “From winner to winner,” he addressed Feijóo. “Since we are on equal terms, why do you have more right to be president of the government than I do to be mayor of my city?” He challenged him.
“In a parliamentary democracy, whoever manages to form a government wins,” he explained, according to the constitutional mandate. “I recognized my defeat, despite being the most voted,” he admitted. And he reproached the leader of the PP that “he has not yet learned to lose, and it is in the opposition where political stature is given.”
Puente attacked Feijóo. The difference, they alleged in the PSOE, is that the PP leader’s speech was a “bombardment of false data”, while Puente “has not told a single lie.”
“You are not president, nor are you trustworthy,” he blamed Feijóo. “He does not have the support to be president of the government, and very soon he will not have the support to continue presiding over his party,” he warned him.
Puente accused Feijóo of paying homage to Vox: “The PP is so degraded that it has ended up being parasitized by the extreme right.” And he attacked the alleged cases of corruption, illegal financing and PP bonuses, in addition to reproaching Feijóo for “his close friendship with a drug trafficker.” He even aligned Feijóo with the “most rancid” PP of Galicia, “that great family portrayed in Fariña.”
Puente criticized the PP for calling for “rebellion” in the PSOE in search of another tamayazo. “Lose all hope of breaking this PSOE,” he warned. “It may not be the same PSOE from 30 years ago, but don’t get nostalgic, because they did the same thing to the PSOE from 30 years ago, although some of those who led it then seem to have forgotten it,” he reproached Felipe González and Alfonso War. “None of them are anymore representative of this PSOE,” he concluded, because the party is “shielded against external interference and belongs to its members.”
