After two months of political silence, forced by a very complex negotiation, Pedro Sánchez spoke this morning in Congress and we could say that he was comfortable. Today he has said everything that he has kept silent about for two months. This morning he saw on the Congress platform a man sure of himself, not at all scared. A traditional digital newspaper that is not very fond of what the President of the Government represents headlined this afternoon: “Sánchez is coming up.” Indeed, this could be a bullfighting reading of the speech of the candidate for the presidency of the Government.
Two months of unprecedented political pressure, unrestrained insults on social networks, in telephone gatherings and in the columns of the capital’s press, massive demonstrations in some cities in Spain, especially in Madrid, Seville, Malaga, Zaragoza and Valencia, called by the Popular Party, without any incident, and more than a week of harassment by a few hundred fascists at the PSOE headquarters on Ferraz Street in Madrid, have not made a dent in the general secretary of the Socialist Party. The candidate has expressed his respect for the protesters and reminded them that Parliament has the last word.
It has not wrinkled, it has not flattened, it has not receded. This attitude is important in the reading code of traditional Spain. “He has come up,” they exclaim on line 7 of the Las Ventas bullring. “In Spain, he who resists wins,” said the writer Camilo José Cela on a very notable occasion, upon receiving the Prince of Asturias Award in 1987. (“In Spain—and I tell you, Your Highness, because you are young and Spanish— “he who resists, wins,” the writer literally said). Half a century earlier, Dr. Juan Negrín, the most courageous and lucid of the republican political leaders during the Civil War, launched a slogan that would be remembered for decades: “Resisting is conquering.” Today Sánchez presents some traits of Negrín, whose memory was rehabilitated by the PSOE in 2008 at the initiative of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
The will to resist is not always a guarantee of victory (history certifies this), but it shapes character and transmits a message of strength. This morning, Sánchez wanted to instill security in the more than twelve million Spaniards who went to the polling stations last July with different political ideas but with a common purpose: to avoid a government conditioned or influenced by the extreme right. These citizens, who are the majority in the electoral body, have lived the last few weeks with anguish.
The purpose is clear. Sánchez wants to resist and win the European elections in Spain in June, to stabilize the situation and give cruising speed to the legislature. The Popular Party also wants to win these elections, to place Sánchez two moves away from checkmate: weak in Europe and with a parliamentary majority that is difficult to cohere, a very complex majority in which Podemos, with five deputies, will soon be on the sidelines. by Sumar.
The European stage will be the key starting tomorrow, when Sánchez gets the investiture, if there are no surprises. The new government will have a strong political profile. And there will be battles in Brussels, in the offices and in the corridors. It is still significant that Joaquín Almunia, former secretary general of the PSOE and former vice president of the European Commission, the most prudent of the party’s veteran leaders, has today expressed his support for the amnesty law, stating that it is very difficult for Brussels I rejected it. The European Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders, clarified today that he is not “concerned” about this law, that he has only requested information. There will be a fight in every office and in every hallway, and the strategist of the PP’s battle in Europe is Esteban González Pons, who this morning had very theatrical moments during Sánchez’s speech. The PP must move away from Vox’s trapist strategy and has only one path: try to take the battle to Europe. Summon the PSOE to the European elections in June.
Sánchez took the stand today to draw a dilemma, with electoral tones: progressivism or barbarism. The Spain of pacts with peripheral forces or the specter of Milei.
Quite possibly his speech did not please the independence supporters very much, as he presented the amnesty as a political and moral triumph of the Constitution and open Spain.
