Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo have finally agreed to hold their first and long-awaited meeting tomorrow, Friday, before the end of the current year. Just on the day when the traditional Christmas lottery draw will be held, while half of Spain will be waiting more to see if it will be the big one or, at least, a reinstatement to face the increase in January.
After a week of dog-and-cat chasing, and after the offices of the two leaders contacted each other to discuss the meeting, the agreement between Sánchez and Feijóo was reached, but amid considerable back-and-forth on both sides, and in a climate of total hostility and absolute lack of understanding, as both attested during the long hours they shared in the plenary that was held from early in the morning at the Congress of Deputies.
The suspicions and mutual mistrust between Sánchez and Feijóo are absolute, and equally extensible and shared by their respective chiefs of staff, Óscar López and Marta Varela, as they both found in this difficult tug-of-war to achieve a simple meeting between the president of the Government and the leader of the opposition. It is not usual for a political representative not to go to the call of the President of the Central Government, at least, it has not been until now.
All this suggests that this meeting, the first between the two after the new investiture of Sánchez as President of the Government, will conclude with a confirmation of their respective and antagonistic positions on all the issues under debate, and without a glimpse no possibility of sealing any great State pact of the many that are pending between the leaders of the two main political forces in Spain.
Not at all, to begin with, on the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary, even though it has already accumulated more than five years with the expired mandate and that all the judicial authorities and even the European Union are urging them to renew it the sooner the better. The PP defends that, without a modification of the law that regulates the election of the members of the Judiciary, so that the judges elect the judges, as Europe demands, there is nothing to be done.
And more so after the members of the PSOE, especially Junts, have pointed out magistrates and announced their intention – which the Prime Minister has rejected out of hand – to have some judges appear who intervened in the most controversial cases of the process in the investigative commissions approved in Congress in this legislature.
In this climate, it seemed that Sánchez and Feijóo, at the Congress held yesterday, did everything they could to prevent tomorrow’s meeting from taking place. Fifteen days after the president’s intention to summon him became known in the press and nine days after the heads of cabinet of both held a first conversation, in which the PP asked for an agenda in writing, Feijóo gave him send a letter on Tuesday night in which he accepted, among the three proposed by the president, the date of December 22, this Friday, for the appointment.
The leader of the PP listed in his letter a long list of issues that he wants to address and that, a priori, were not among the issues that, at least publicly, the president of the Spanish Government has raised. The leader of the opposition wants to talk about the amnesty law; of institutional deterioration, with reference to the Council of State and the Prosecutor’s Office; of the “depoliticization of the public media”, in reference to RTVE and the Efe agency; of the “positioning on the judicial prevarication denounced by the PSOE, Junts and ERC, and of the defense of the Judiciary against the “harassment” by the allies of the majority of the investiture. However, Feijóo also offers to address, according to this letter, the measures “to guarantee judicial independence”, that is to say, of the governing body of judges. At least on one point, the agenda of the meeting between Sánchez and Feijóo coincides, even if, in all probability, what one asks and the other offers have nothing to do.
In the letter, the leader of the opposition also wants to bring to the meeting the negotiations held in Geneva between the PSOE and Junts, in addition to the tax increases agreed with Sumar and the plans to help citizens to cope with the effects of inflation.
Finally, the leader of the PP, who left nothing unturned, also asks in his letter for the paralysis of the motion of censure in Pamplona with Bildu, as well as the debate on the proposed law which, according to the popular people, “intends decriminalize the glorification of terrorism and the attack on national symbols”.
In fact, a good part of these questions were already blown up in the long parliamentary debate on the balance of the Spanish presidency of the Council of the European Union, and on the crisis in the Middle East. “At some point in the legislature, we will have to address the recognition of the Palestinian State by the General Courts and the Government”, defended Sánchez in the debate, which was thus monopolized by this Friday’s meeting.
Sánchez insisted that, with four years of the legislature ahead of him, the leader of the PP “cannot continue to settle in permanent anger and rage”. And he reiterated his readiness to seal State pacts with Feijóo. “Spain needs agreements”, he claimed. And he underlined the three points on which he wants to reach agreements, with reference to the renewal of the CGPJ, the update of the regional financing system and the reform of article 49 of the Constitution.
“It seems that he has rectified his desire to plant me”, congratulated Sánchez, before the letter sent by Feijóo.
The president warned him that the meeting could be held “however he wants, where he wants, and when he wants.” And, in his replica turn, Feijóo picked up the glove. “Like, without a mediator; where, not in Geneva, in the Congress”. And about when, the leader of the PP accepted the date of December 22.
Feijóo’s answer, for the meeting to take place in Congress, upset Sánchez, who intended to hold it in Moncloa. But, finally, the president accepted it: “As you say, we’ll see you on Friday in Congress, and we’ll talk about what you want.”
