“We can’t let anyone blackmail us!” cried Felipe González. The former president of the government, at 81 years old, admitted that his legs are already failing. But he doesn’t have the vision, nor the courage to touch subtent. “We cannot allow ourselves to be blackmailed by anyone, much less by minorities on the verge of extinction!” warned González.
Together with him, Alfonso Guerra also called not to take a single step back, not to resign and to forcefully reject the amnesty and the self-determination referendum. “Accepting this aggression in silence would make us accomplices in the breakdown of the constitutional pact!”, warned the former vice-president of the government, who in turn adds 83 springs.
The concourse packed in the audience and on the upper floor of the main chair of the ancient Ateneo de Madrid, where a large part of the Old Testament of the PSOE, which maintains González and Guerra as the great patriarchs, was concentrated, burst into applause. Many, rights.
Felipe and Alfonso, as they have always called them, with a mixture of pride, admiration and even fear, are united again, hand in hand, after decades of friction and ruptures, the faithful congratulated each other. “Would anyone be surprised if he didn’t agree?”, admitted González, so Guerra finished chaining the admonitions against the change of criteria that both agreed to attribute to Pedro Sánchez.
The alarm is that, in order to put the investiture on track, Sánchez will adopt an amnesty law against those accused of the process, which he categorically denied until the general elections of July 23. “I have not been disloyal or dissident, rather the other has been, who has been changing”, defended and criticized Guerra, alluding to Sánchez.
“I am defending the party’s positions”, González agreed. And he recalled that not only Sánchez, but also the leader of the PSC, Salvador Illa, affirmed until the elections that there is neither amnesty nor self-determination. “The paradox we live in, Alfonso, is that we defend the party’s positions”, he insisted. It is, therefore, the current leader of the PSOE who got lost.
“There is no amnesty and no self-determination,” said González, who equated the referendum demanded by Catalan independence with the “self-destruction” of Spain.
Guerra launched a harsh diatribe against Catalan independence. Among other issues, he warned that “in Catalonia there is no full freedom”, for example, to speak the “mother tongue” of many of the inhabitants, which is Spanish. And he assured that there are even “inspectors” who prevent children from speaking in Spanish in the school yard. Again, big applause.
Among the attendees Guerra himself warned, first of all, that it was not “a plot or a conspiracy”, an intention that he attributed only to “a lunatic mind”, since it was the presentation of his latest book , La rosa y las espinas (La Esfera), there was the president of Castilla-La Mancha, Emiliano García-Page, and other former socialist regional presidents, such as the Aragonese Javier Lambán, the Asturian Javier Fernández, the Andalusian José Rodríguez de la Borbolla or the extremist Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra. Also Nicolás Redondo Terreros, just expelled from the PSOE.
And many former ministers from the mandates of González and Guerra, such as José Barrionuevo, José Luis Corcuera, Rosa Conde, Virgilio Zapatero, Javier Sáenz de Cosculluela, Fernando Ledesma or Matilde Fernández.
“The War has cut off his ear”, summed up with irony, at the exit, one of the attendees at the Socialist Old Testament. “Two!”, they confirmed.
