“Let’s look for solutions in which the most voted list is acceptable when there is no other option. What do we ask in exchange for allowing them to govern? Nothing. If you don’t ask for anything, they will have to reach agreements on each bill and budget.” Former Prime Minister Felipe González spoke like this at the presentation of the monographic issue of Nueva Revista entitled “To agree is to progress”, coordinated by the former head of Opinion at El País, the political scientist José Ignacio Torreblanca, director of the Madrid Office of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).
González claimed that “coexistence is built on the pact” and demanded, as a precondition, “respect for the Constitution and the legal system, even to change them.” The former president claimed the backbone role of the PSOE as the backbone of Spanish society: “When it comes to institutions, the PSOE has a systemic role in this society” and that is why the socialists are “the only acronyms that remain from the constitutional pact”.
In this sense, he demanded respect for his party, not as an exercise in nostalgia, but “to take into account where we come from and guide us on where we are going.” González, who denied that Spanish society participates in the tension and political polarization, insistently claimed “the role of the PSOE and it offends me that they insult the PSOE, especially those who say they help it, those who are its partners,” he said, alluding to United Can. “We have spent a century, since 1923, putting up with not being called social traitors,” he stressed, emphasizing that “And I make a vindication of what we were, not so that we can be so again, but because it is a story with a future.”
In the presentation, in which González was accompanied by the coordinator of the issue of Nueva Revista, Ignacio Torreblanca, and the former minister Jordi Sevilla, president of the Social Council of UNIR, host of the event held this Monday at the Centro Riojano in Madrid, the speakers, In addition to the aforementioned, sociologists José Juan Toharia and Cristina Monge, former deputies Ramón Jáuregui and Ángeles Álvarez, and journalist Miguel Ángel Aguilar, vindicated the philosophy of the bipartisan pact and lamented, in Toharia’s words, that “bibloquism” that has What happened to the bipartisanship has put the PP and PSOE on their backs to each other, due to the action “of the most extreme partner of each of the blocks”, alluding to United We Can and Vox.
Toharia assured that 80% of Spaniards, according to polls, want pacts between the PP and the PSOE, pacts that in the current block policy seem impossible, for which reason the same 80% consider “politicians more of a problem what a solution”
González insisted on respect for the Constitution and regretted its non-compliance, according to his criteria, a factor of ruin for democratic society. “The problem with enforcing the Constitution is that when it is broken, it cracks below the waterline,” he explained, so that the damage is invisible and, like a building damaged in its foundations, “when you note, it is when it has already sunk”. In this sense, “the pact for survival as a society is respect for the Constitution and the legal system.”
