No matter how good the opposition is in a country, elections end up being won or lost by governments. It is good for the opposition candidates to have a good alternative program to govern and to be skilled at choosing the best moments to censure the executive. But they also don’t need to put in much more effort, because, if not, there is a risk that they will slip up and end up giving arguments to the government they intend to overthrow.
This explanation comes as a surprise because the last week has not been the best for Alberto Núñez Feijóo. The leader of the PP was not to blame that Vox’s motion of censure ended up becoming an oxygen balloon for Pedro Sánchez. I have my doubts about the popular decision to abstain and I think it would have made much more sense to vote against it as Pablo Casado did in the first Vox motion, but that is not the problem. Feijóo must present an image of future president above partisanship and, in this sense, it is a mistake to go to Brussels to criticize the Government’s policy. That even a European commissioner like Paolo Gentiloni asks him to make a “more constructive opposition” is a message to ponder. We can agree with the leader of the PP on some of the mistakes of this Government, but it is ugly to go out to Europe to blow them up in order to obtain electoral income. Or it could have been spared to say that the pension reform that Emmanuel Macron is promoting is better than that of Sánchez when France has a serious problem with the daily riots. And the dessert was organizing an event in Madrid for the Hispanic immigrant community on the same day that the King and the President of the Spanish Government were at the Ibero-American Summit of the Dominican Republic. Feijóo couldn’t think of anything other than to attack Sánchez for “paying homage to rulers who are apprentices to autocrats” and to “autocrats who use their people to improve themselves”. A sentence that had to be clarified by his team because it gave a terrible diplomatic image when coinciding with the summit. As happens in tennis, they are unforced errors by the PP. No one is forcing Feijóo to take risks and force the game. Precisely because of his trajectory and experience, he does not need these handshakes that can end up going badly.
