The Popular Party has finally decided to withdraw the sanitary cordon that it imposed on Junts just a few days ago to, in view of the insufficient number of support it has for the investiture of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, sit down to negotiate the abstention of a formation of which last week he assured that it was led by a fugitive from justice to today ponder that it is a “party whose tradition and legality is not in doubt.”
This is the first movement dictated by the Genoa national leadership after accepting the King’s proposal to lead an investiture attempt. An important strategy as evidence that up to three members of the party’s national leadership have come out first thing in the morning to explain it: the general coordinator, Elías Bendodo, the general secretary, Cuca Gamarra, and the vice-secretary for Institutional Action, Esteban González Pons.
As the latter has exposed in the Onda Cero microphones, the PP has modified its opinion of Junts to separate the “programmatic coincidences” that it maintains with the formation led by Carles Puigdemont from “the actions that four, five or ten people”. “We are going to talk to everyone except those who have not condemned terrorism”, he pointed out in relation to EH Bildu.
That same willingness to start a dialogue with Junts is what he will maintain with the PNV. With half a dozen refusals to add their votes already counted, the PP will also seek the abstention of the parliamentary group led by Aitor Esteban Pons so that, although in a second vote, the 172 supports of the PP -Vox, UPN and Canary Islands Coalition- could be worth it to evict Pedro Sánchez from the presidency of the Government.
The turn of the helm has been confirmed by the general coordinator of the Popular Party, Elías Bendodo, who in an interview on the Ser channel has been in favor of “trying to talk” with all the parties, including Junts, although he has stressed that those of Carles Puigdemont “have decided a long time ago to be outside” the limits of the Magna Carta.
“It is difficult” to approach Junts because of their positions and political demands, the Andalusian has pointed out, but he has also insisted that the PP must be allowed “to try because politics is the art of achieving the possible and that can only be achieved with dialogue and not putting up walls and trenches”.
“We are going to summon all the political forces; the PP has a red line that is Bildu and that is understood by all of Spain,” Gamarra pointed out shortly after in two interviews on Antena3 and Telecinco.
The idea of ??sitting down to negotiate with Junts is not well received in the Catalan PP. Although there is a sector that has always wanted to open up to moderate Catalanism that would see it favorably, management sources understand that if the idea is consolidated that Feijóo has negotiated with Puigdemont and then he ends up agreeing with Sánchez, the position of the formation popular in Catalonia would once again be at the feet of the horses just when, after the last electoral processes, it seems to be starting to raise its head.
It is a feeling that Alejandro Fernández, leader of the popular Catalans, already expressed when he emphasized a few weeks ago that “if you accuse Sánchez of negotiating with a fugitive, you cannot do the same, unless you assume sanchismo as a method”. To which, PPC sources add another variable by predicting that Vox will get out of the equation again as soon as Feijóo sits down with Nogueras, the spokesperson for Junts in the Congress of Deputies.
