With the round of consultations to nominate a candidate for the investiture already underway, the PP tried yesterday to square the circle: that Alberto Núñez Feijóo could arrive today at his appointment with the King with the support of the PNB of a side and Vox on the other.
The MEP Esteban González Pons, deputy secretary of institutional action of the PP, was in charge of the first objective, who urged the Basque nationalists to recover the role of “hinge party” that they have traditionally developed and sit down to negotiate with the popular not end up being “irrelevant” this legislature.
While the second, the support of the ultra-right, was a little more complicated due to Vox’s demands for “urgent and public explanations” by Feijóo about what his true intentions are after the constitution of Congress leave those of Santiago Abascal without a place on the Table.
Despite the fact that the PNB still sees the investiture as very green and even considers the start of the round of contacts “precipitous”, González Pons said that he was confident that today Felipe VI will announce who will be entrusted with the task in the first instance and defend the options of the candidate of the PP, which is “the party with the most votes” comparable, since ERC, Junts, Bildu and the BNG, some of the hypothetical supporters of Pedro Sánchez, will not go to the Zarzuela.
This is the scene in which the popular leader celebrated the PNB, which did appear yesterday at the appointment with the King, reminding him that he enjoys a “privileged position” after the elections of July 23 and that he could take the opportunity to get away from “the shadow of Pedro Sánchez”, under which he is “embedded”, said González Pons, for some reason that he, as he confessed, escapes him.
In any case, “the PP is a state party and will accept the decision that the King takes”, he assured, which is why Feijóo does not consider declining the proposal and will go to the investiture even if it is bankrupt: it is a debt contract with his voters and an opportunity to “contrast the model of Spain he wants”, affirmed González Pons, who ruled out the repetition of Mariano Rajoy’s resignation in 2016: “In a democracy forms matter”, he stated
“We have to try. We will all portray ourselves. It must not be accepted as a fatality to go towards a Frankenstein plus with which Spain can end up being dismantled and sold in pieces”, predicted the popular leader, who in the morning, when he was interviewed by Cope, counted that Vox would comply ” his word” and would reaffirm his support for Feijóo, not knowing that at noon, in Barcelona, ??the general secretary of the far-right party, Ignacio Garriga, would do just the opposite.
From Parliament, Garriga raised the tone to demand that the president of the PP pick up the phone yesterday and call Abascal to give “urgent explanations” if he wanted to revalidate the support of Vox’s 33 deputies, previously offered without compensation.
The disagreement in the composition of the Congress Bureau, where the PP left Vox at the last moment without the place it longed for in order not to inconvenience Coalició Canària, whose support it obtained, nor the PNB, which agreed, instead , with the PSOE, has reversed the initial willingness to invest Feijóo expressed by an ultra-right that feels slighted.
In this way, Garriga vehemently demanded that the conservative candidate clarify yesterday, and in a “public” way, his position, which in view of what has happened now raises “serious doubts” to Vox, so that Abascal can go to the his appointment with the King with clear ideas. If today before ten o’clock there was no contact, the far-right leader will not guarantee before Felipe VI that his people will vote in favor of Feijóo.
For this reason, he said, the PP must decide if it wants to form an “alternative government to the one of national destruction” of Sánchez with the sum of Vox, although Garriga ignored that with these numbers, alone, there is no enough, or prefers to continue in the “drift” of the “anti-democratic cordon” arm in arm with the PNB and the “leftist parties” and isolate its formation from the decision-making bodies of the institutions. If Feijóo renounces “institutional neutrality”, without recognizing the strength represented by the three million Spaniards who voted for Vox, argued Garriga defiantly, he will not be president.
“Let him clarify what his strategy is,” exclaimed the far-right leader in a show of force that, considering last week’s resentments in Congress, did not seem like a tactical bluff, but rather a blow on the table: Vox wants to know “with which party” is he talking, pointed out Garriga in allusion to the differences that are being expressed within the PP regarding the negotiations with its possible allies.
Although he conceded that, at least at that time of the day, nothing that had been said meant withdrawing or ratifying support for Feijóo’s investiture, Garriga recalled that Vox is the “preferred partner” of the PP in several local governments and autonomous regions, for which he vindicated the “sensible and reasonable” pacts signed in the Valencian Community, the Balearic Islands, Extremadura or Aragon after 23-J before the “blockade” of Murcia, which could end, he warned, with a electoral repetition that would exacerbate hostilities with the PP.
