The PSC candidate for the major elections, Salvador Illa, is not a person to enter into conflicts or to fuel an exchange of statements with political rivals. Her manners, polite and calm, and which she often claims in the electoral events that have been held to date, were praised by the former president of the Government, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, at a rally in Girona, but Illa could not repress this Sunday respond to the criticism that the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has been voicing during his electoral tour of Catalonia. “Mr. Feijóo, if he comes to Catalonia to practice or advise the same opposition that he practices in Madrid, it will go very badly.”
Illa was forceful about the ways of the opposition leader, who has called the PSC candidate irrelevant, pro-independence, and untrustworthy, among other accusations. The socialist, who has made it a rule not to fall into provocations, allowed himself at the Girona rally “only one comment” that he doubts could have any effect but with which “I want to have a clear conscience,” he said. And after warning that his way of practicing politics in Madrid will not serve him well in the Catalan race, he warned him that “it is not the way, neither there (in Madrid) nor here (in Catalonia), but here much less so.” .
The PSC candidate once again asked for “a lot of caution” given the results that the polls show and that place him as the winner at the polls. “Nothing is done until a vote is taken” and “many citizens decide at the last moment, therefore, to continue working,” he stated. That is why he once again fought against the greatest possible force that would allow him not only to win but also to govern. “We ask for more,” he said, because the 12-M elections “are elections that will mark a turning point in Catalonia and in Spain.”
Illa addressed the undecided, the voters of other parties (“those who have never voted for us”) to offer them three things: “credibility” against the baggage of the Junts and ERC governments of the last 10 years; stability, which “those who had 74 deputies in the last legislature have not demonstrated,” and realism, because “it is advisable to measure the proposals that are made these days based on whether they are feasible, viable,” he warned. That of the PSC is, for the socialist candidate, a “credible, stable and possible approach.”
Illa once again positioned Junts as the greatest rival to beat, establishing the dilemma between voting and vetoing. “We want votes, not vetoes. We are the party of the vote, not the veto. The vote chooses, the veto prevents. The vote allows a government, the veto prevents a government,” she said. That is why the candidate asked for a “direct vote” to the PSC, to avoid “clashes,” because anything other than this is “blockade, mess and more of the same,” he warned.
For his part, Zapatero made a plea in favor of socialism as a guarantee and maximum defender of democracy against the right, with examples such as the attitude of the PP when he himself won the 2004 elections, after the 11-M attack, or the “hypocritical, lying, fallacious campaign” that in his opinion the popular ones launch when they accuse the PSOE of wanting to control the Judiciary when it is Feijóo’s party that has agreed to reform the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) for five years , recalled the former president.
On the other hand, Zapatero praised Illa’s political character, whom he compared to her “spirit”, and expressed his pride and identification with the PSC candidate. “Having a leader, a president, of calm, of serenity, of tranquility, we need it so much…” said Zapatero, who placed the Catalan candidate as “the best example of politics with respect and respect for democracy.” ” and as a “decisive person” in Spanish politics, not only for his role as future president but as “a leader who stabilizes Spain, who accompanies Sánchez, with that sincerity, capacity for calm and serenity,” he defined.
For the former president, the Catalan electoral contest transcends the election of the next president itself as a consequence of the “risks and threats to democracy since Trumpism.” In fact, Zapatero ended his intervention by referring to immigration to reject the role of xenophobia and racism throughout history. “The worst, supremacism; the best, the word, dialogue, coexistence, serenity, democracy, respect and Salvador Illa,” he concluded.
