“Long live Spain!” Ramón Tamames and Santiago Abascal shouted in unison, with the rest of Vox’s deputies, in the family photo for which they sat contentedly in the congressional chamber at the end of the vote on the motion of no confidence that they raised against Pedro Sánchez and that ended with a resounding failure.
The extravagant result of the debate, however, was not profited by the main potential beneficiary of Vox’s serious miscalculation, the Popular Party, with its leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, engaged in a European agenda that yesterday brought him to meet Ursula von del Leyen, president of the European Commission. And all this just two months before the municipal and regional elections on May 28.
“Long live the motion!”, the deputies of the far-right won, despite the fact that the initiative only had the support of the proposing group itself, that is to say, the 52 deputies of the formation led by Abascal, with the only added ballot of Pablo Cambronero, a defecting ex-deputy from Ciutadans now attached to the mixed group. In total, 53 yes. From 350.
In the middle, in a difficult balancing act, 91 abstentions. Those of the 88 seats of the PP of Feijóo, and the two MPs expelled from the UPN, Carlos García Adanero and Sergio Sayas – who will now run for the PP in the Navarre elections–, and the representative of Fòrum Astúries, Isidro Martínez Oblanca. All of them rejected the previous invitation that Abascal extended to them: “Let’s vote together today to understand each other tomorrow”.
“We will not vote in favor of this motion out of respect for the Spaniards, and we will not vote against this motion out of respect for Tamames”, justified yesterday the spokeswoman for the PP, Cuca Gamarra. “Spain is waiting for an alternative, but it’s not you”, explained the veteran economist.
Gamarra criticized Vox for what he described as an “idle motion” – a term that annoyed the failed candidate -, because in his opinion it grants “momentary relief to this agonizing Government”. “An inexplicable gift to the Government, which will be able to display a unity that it does not have”, Gamarra warned, before the staging of the cohesion of the coalition Executive that Pedro Sánchez and Vice President Yolanda Díaz exhibited on the eve.
“Mission accomplished!”, they cried instead in Moncloa, so the president of the Congress, Meritxell Batet, certified the death of Vox’s motion of censure, when it added up to 201 votes against, those of the rest of the groups of the Chamber. “This reformist project of social progress is strong, with more desire than ever to continue moving forward”, celebrated Sánchez in his final speech.
The president thanked the large majority of Congress for their rejection of a “rocambolesque attempt to stop our country dry and to bring down a legitimate Government, either from the yes or from the abstention”, he pointed out, in reference to the positions of Vox and the PP.
Sánchez again focused on the absence of Feijóo, in addition to the abstention of the PP. “Feijóo is silent because he knows he needs Vox to govern”, he denounced. “But no one can take a profile or be equidistant, they can be indifferent to a constitutional fraud like what we have experienced with this scorched earth motion”, he warned.
In Moncloa they showed satisfaction because they saw all their goals achieved. First of all, to be able to highlight the Government’s action – “it’s always good, because the news is absorbed in 24 hours”, they allege before the list of approved measures with which they can barely recreate themselves -, and to plus create an image of internal cohesion, thanks to the alliance between Pedro Sánchez and Yolanda Díaz.
“The coalition comes out of it strengthened, consolidated and synchronized”, they insist nevertheless in the Moncloa, after a debate that they emphasize aroused great interest in the public – only on TVE it had a 24% audience – and that in addition, they consider that it “mobilizes the progressive electorate”, before the next appointment with the ballot boxes on 28-M and also for the general elections in December. In the Executive, they also emphasize that Feijóo “comes out touched” from a debate in which he did not want to be Vox’s stone guest. “The PP is linked to the ultra-right with an abstention that tries to legitimize Vox in the face of the electoral situation, which is irresponsible”, they denounce.
The offensive of the right, together or separately, is always the best glue for the left. But in Podemos the ministers Irene Montero and Ione Belarra called on the PSOE to move once and for all “from words to deeds”. “The facts are the laws and decrees that protect the vast majority of the population”, replied the socialists.
The final day, apart from that, left another picturesque intervention by Tamames, who put in a compromise both those who voted yes and the abstentionists, with his singular approaches to national and international politics. He sprinkled his speech with anecdotes and memories of people he met, he emphasized that he had found the speech of Mireia Vehí, spokesperson of the CUP, very interesting, “especially in relation to the question of Catalonia” – for astonishment of the deputies of the CUP and to the horror of those of Vox – and again proclaimed the Spanishness of Gibraltar as the great affront that the motherland suffers.
A hilarious moment was his response to the PNB spokesman, Aitor Esteban, to whom he spoke of his respect for the Basque, of when he frequented Baroja and narrated his prison camaraderie in 1976 with prisoners from the ETA commune in Carabanchel, to whom he lectured on economics. In a hemicycle in which the ex-spokesperson of the PP Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo called the father of the then vice-president of the Spanish Government a “terrorist”, Pablo Iglesias, for having distributed communist postcards in 1973, must have caused shivers in the deputies of Vox and of the PP the familiarity that Tamames boasted of with the ETA prisoners a year after Franco’s death.
It was not clear if Tamames was happy with the experience. On the one hand, he assured that the attitude of the spokesmen towards him “is no way to receive anyone, let alone a candidate”, and on the other, he said that the public impact of the motion proves the political “liveliness” of the country.
Antonio Gala wrote decades ago that the risk of eating the last almond in the jar is that, if it is bitter, there is no other to mitigate that bitterness.
