The campaign for the municipal and regional elections of May 28 moved to the Senate yesterday, where Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo delivered their last and bitter parliamentary confrontation before this appointment with the polls. But the President of the Government and the leader of the Popular Party intensified their political struggle, with a battery of mutual reproaches and disqualifications, with the horizon of the general elections scheduled for December.
“This is great for him or he is far from it”, warned Sánchez, following Feijóo’s claim to evict him from La Moncloa. “He will not be able to stop the force of change that Spain wants”, warned the leader of the PP, who advanced “the most urgent reform” that he will undertake if he reaches the presidency of the Government: “Repeal Sanchism”.
“If Spain wants change, we will repeal Sanchismo”, he said. Not only to overturn the vast majority of the coalition Government’s policies, which he portrayed as an Executive “divided, without leadership and hijacked” by independence and populism, but to repeal “his way of doing politics”, according to his opinion dominated by “pride”. “His Government is broken”, he certified.
“His leap into national politics has been a disappointment”, replied the leader of the PSOE. “The Galicians have won and all the Spaniards have lost”, quipped Sánchez, after Feijóo’s 13 years of absolute majorities at the head of the Xunta de Galicia before taking over from Pablo Casado as head of the main party of the opposition “He has extended the insulting style of Casado”, Sánchez criticized a Feijóo whom he described as “irritated, aggressive and frustrated”, with an “insolent tone”, and subjected to the extreme right of Vox.
Willing to maintain the initiative and impose his political agenda, in the face of a Feijóo that the socialists see as “rebuffed” from his successive announcements, Sánchez took the opportunity to insist on confronting his bet to deploy “the largest expansion of the park public rental housing” of democracy, with the “neoliberal model” that he attributed to the PP, and that he equated with the “culture of pelotazo, corruption and speculation” based on the Land Law of José MarÃa Aznar the 1998. Sánchez announced that the Executive will promote 20,000 more affordable public housing units, through the public company Sepes, on land owned by the Ministry of Defence, which is one of the main landowners in Spain. An additional project to the Campamento operation, in Madrid, unblocked after long decades of delays, which foresees the promotion of 12,000 homes.
Sánchez fired up the calculator to highlight his ad. These 20,000 new flats on Defense land will be added to the 50,000 public housing for affordable rent of the Sareb and to the 43,000 that will be financed with credits from the ICO worth 4,000 million euros. In total, 113,000 public flats announced over the last ten days. With the Ministry of Transport’s affordable rental housing plan, the global figure rises to 183,000 flats. And Sánchez contrasted this figure with the 1,600 public homes projected in the two terms of office of Rajoy, between 2011 and 2018.
“This looks like the miracle of bread and flats!” Feijóo quipped. And he denounced that Sánchez “is living off the debt and the deficit”. “It’s impossible to beat him with demagoguery!” he cried. And he counterattacked with the reform of the only yes is yes law, which will go ahead thanks to the PP despite the resistance of Unides Podemos. “I will support the fact that the punishment for pederasts and rapists is not cheaper,” he said. “Nothing, you don’t need to thank me”, he said to the leader of the PSOE. And he insisted that responsibilities be cleared: “Either dismiss someone, or they can leave”. But Sánchez defended his correction of the rule: “When one makes a mistake, the best thing is to rectify”. “I apologized publicly to the victims”, he recalled.
And he demanded Feijóo withdraw the initiative of the Andalusian president, Juanma Moreno Bonilla, to regularize illegal irrigation in Doñana, questioned by the European Commission. But the leader of the PP replied: “Don’t use Doñana as an electoral trigger!”. A demand that he warned is not his, but Alfonso Guerra’s.
