With the round of consultations to name a candidate for the investiture already underway, yesterday the PP tried to square the circle: that Alberto Núñez Feijóo could arrive today for his appointment with the King with the support of the PNV on the one hand and of Vox on the other.
The MEP Esteban González Pons, deputy secretary for institutional action of the PP, was in charge of the first, who urged the Basque nationalists to recover the role of “hinge party” that they have traditionally played and sit down to negotiate with the popular ones so as not to end up being “irrelevant ” this legislature.
While the second, the support of the extreme 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 he left in the constitution of Congress those of Santiago Abascal without a place at the Table.
Although the PNV still sees the investiture as very green and even considers the start of the round of contacts “hasty”, González Pons said he is confident that Felipe VI will announce today who will be in charge in the first instance and defended the options of the PP candidate , which is verifiable “the party that has the most votes”, since ERC, Junts, Bildu and BNG, some of Pedro Sánchez’s hypothetical supporters, will not attend Zarzuela.
This is the scenario in which the popular leader courted the PNV, which did show up yesterday for the appointment with the King, reminding him that he enjoys a “privileged position” after the July 23 elections and that he could take advantage of the occasion to to get away from “the shadow of Pedro Sánchez”, under which he is “embedded”, said González Pons, for some reason that, as he confessed, escapes him.
In any case, “the PP is a state party and will accept the decision made by the King,” he assured, so Feijóo is not considering declining the proposal and will go to the investiture, even if it is unsuccessful: it is a debt contracted with his voters and an opportunity to “contrast the model of Spain that he wants,” said González Pons, who thus ruled out the repetition of Mariano Rajoy’s resignation in 2016: “In a democracy, forms matter,” he said.
From Parliament, Garriga raised his 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 the 33 Vox deputies, previously offered without compensation.
The disagreement in the composition of the Congress Table, where the PP left Vox at the last moment without the place it longed for so as not to bother the Canary Islands Coalition, whose support it obtained, nor the PNV, which agreed, instead, with the PSOE , has disrupted the initial predisposition to invest Feijóo expressed by an extreme right that feels underestimated.
Thus, Garriga vehemently urged the conservative candidate to clarify yesterday, and in a “public” way, his position, which in view of what happened now raises “serious doubts” in Vox, so that Abascal could go to his appointment with the King with clear ideas. If this contact has not taken place today before ten o’clock, 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 has to decide if it wants to form an “alternative government to that of national destruction” of Sánchez with the sum of Vox, although Garriga ignored that these numbers, by themselves, do not give, or prefers to continue in the ” derives” from the “anti-democratic cordon” by the hand of the PNV and the “leftist parties” and isolate their formation from the decision-making bodies of the institutions. If Feijóo renounces “institutional neutrality”, without recognizing the force represented by the three million Spaniards who voted for Vox, Garriga argued defiantly, he will not be president.
“Let him clarify what his strategy is,” exclaimed the far-right leader in a show of force that, judging by last week’s resentment in Congress, did not seem like a tactical bluff, but rather a blow on the table: Vox wants to know “Which party” is he talking to, Garriga said, alluding to the differences that are manifesting within the PP on negotiations with his possible allies.
Although he conceded that, at least at that time of day, nothing said meant withdrawing or ratifying support for Feijóo’s investiture, Garriga recalled that Vox is the “preferred partner” of the PP in various local and regional governments, so He vindicated the “sensible and reasonable” pacts signed in the Valencian Community, the Balearic Islands, Extremadura or Aragon after 23-J against the “blockade” of Murcia, which could end, he warned, with an electoral repetition that would exacerbate hostilities with the PP.
