All day yesterday, the Popular Party entertained the possibility of the total defeat of the Government, with the repeal of the three decree laws that Congress had to validate. But after the chaos of the votes and the surprising final outcome, Alberto Núñez Feijóo did not wait to emphasize from the Senate that “Spain does not deserve this.”
For the president of the PP, the concessions of the Executive to the independentists constitute “the ridicule, the humiliation and the disgrace” of a Government willing to make “very serious” concessions to avoid defeat.
In an appearance before the media in the Upper House, Feijóo regretted what had happened, to the point of confessing that if he had known that politics consisted of what has been experienced in recent days and hours, he would not have dedicated himself to her.
The head of the opposition declared himself “stunned by the situation in the country,” a feeling he said he shared with the majority of Spaniards, who wonder “what this is.”
Feijóo did not refer so much to the way in which the votes were carried out – three of them had to be repeated and at some point the telematic system crashed – and, in fact, he almost ignored the content of the decrees, both the two that were approved as the one that has declined, but to the negotiations that the Government carried out throughout the day with the independence groups – in particular, with Junts per Catalunya – and to “the transfers and marketing” with which Pedro Sánchez, at At the end of the afternoon, he managed to save a situation that seemed insurmountable. “My country does not deserve this,” Feijóo concluded. “He does not deserve this absurdity, this absurdity of misgovernment in which we are mired.”
In the opinion of the PP, what happened with the decrees is “a disgrace”, because, regardless of the results of the votes and the content of the decrees, “the Government has made a fool of itself, marketing the rights of all Spaniards”, and without the Spanish knowing, at least until yesterday, what has been negotiated and in exchange for what.
For Feijóo, what has been demonstrated is that the Government “is presided over by a president without portfolio; The action of the Sánchez Government is decided from Geneva or from Brussels, where it is said what is approved, how it is approved, when it is approved and, apparently, how long the legislature will last.”
The situation is serious, according to Feijóo, because, he said, “it is the first time in the democratic history of Spain that the Government has transferred national sovereignty outside of the Cortes, the first time that the direction of the Executive does not depend on anyone who feels in the Council of Ministers and the first time that the prerogative of the duration of the legislature does not reside with the President of the Government”, but rather it is a decision, he noted, that is taken outside of Spain. But also, according to Feijóo, the Executive’s transfers show that the Government “has lost respect for the Spanish people.”
The leader of the PP complains that the decrees have been approved without the Government having explained what it has granted to Junts for their abstention, and that the Spaniards and the parties only know what Junts says it has agreed with the Government.
And Feijóo also referred to this in his appearance before the press, especially, to the transfer of immigration powers, which the PP will study, when they are known, to decide whether to take them to the Constitutional Court.
And Feijóo considers that immigration powers involve border control, which is why he wonders if Catalonia “is a State with borders different from those of Spain.” Furthermore, these powers would leave in the hands of Catalonia, as indicated, the decision of whether or not to accept immigrants from other autonomous communities, which is why the PP wants to know if the Generalitat “will be able to decide who comes and who does not come from other communities.” .
The leader of the PP also referred to the publication of the fiscal balances, “as if Spain were a kingdom of taifas”, and to the repeal of the reform of the Criminal Procedure law that made difficult, in the opinion of Junts, the effectiveness of the amnesty. Feijóo wondered “how much more” Sánchez will be able to humiliate himself, “how much extortion he is able to endure from his partners and how much ridicule remains to be seen.”