“Honestly, I don’t think this was the best idea he’s ever had,” Pedro Sánchez warned Ramón Tamames, for offering to present himself as a candidate brought by Santiago Abascal to the motion of no confidence promoted by the extreme right. “Vox is not just another party”, the Prime Minister has pointed out to him. It is not what in its day was the PCE or the CDS, where Tamames himself was a member. “Vox is something else,” he has insisted. “Those who are promoting his candidacy are the successors of Blas Piñar,” Sánchez stressed, referring to the former leader of the extreme right-wing formation Fuerza Nueva during the Spanish transition to democracy. “I regret that it contributes to whitewashing a party that rejects equality and denies climate change,” the PSOE leader reproached the veteran professor.
Sánchez, in a long reply that has made Tamames impatient -he has even interrupted his speech to reproach him “for coming with a bill of 20 pages” to answer him-, has warned that this motion of censure promoted by the extreme right “the only purpose it has it is to overthrow the government”. But he has criticized that, in his speech, Tamames “has not proposed any solution.”
Although Sánchez has forcefully refuted Tamames’ demand to cut public spending in Spain by 60,000 million euros. The President of the Government has criticized that the alternative candidate of the ultra-right in his motion of no confidence wields “the old neoliberal recipe” that also blames the Popular Party. The same “neoliberal response”, of tax cuts and cuts in public spending, which had a “heartbreaking result” for Spain with Mariano Rajoy during the financial crisis a decade ago. “Competing in precariousness and cuts does not work, it tore Spain apart,” he replied. “He has not found out about the change in the economic paradigm,” Sánchez has blamed the veteran economist.
Sánchez has celebrated, at least, that Tamames has not spoken of Catalonia in his speech. “I am glad, because that means that it is not part of their concerns,” he warned, after lamenting that Vox, on the other hand, always seeks to add fuel to the political conflict in Catalonia, in search of electoral gains in the rest of Spain. The President of the Government, in any case, has put forward his agenda for the reunion in Catalonia, which in his opinion has achieved that “social tension has subsided and coexistence returns to the streets.”
