Princess Leonor’s Twelfth of October took place under a radiant sun in Madrid. A summery and peaceful day, with many people in the street, only tense by the anger of the capital’s right against Pedro Sánchez, general secretary of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, acting president of the Government and political winner of the last general elections if he does not is forced to repeat the elections due to lack of support for his investiture. This is the main focus today.
A summer day in the middle of autumn. A world that changes. A world with two atrocious wars underway, and others in the waiting room, drawing horrors on the horizon. A calmer country than what the feverish media transmits. A certainly complicated political situation and the supporters of the Salamanca neighborhood shouting: “Let Txapote vote for you!” Yesterday was an interesting and surely instructive day for the notebook of the heir to the throne, who on the 31st will swear in the Constitution before the Congress of Deputies.
“Let Txapote vote for you!” shouts the mass of the race after having politically lost the last general elections, despite the overwhelming predictions of victory in the more than one hundred surveys that were published in Spain during the first 17 days of July.
That slogan, which Alberto Núñez Feijóo never liked, won in the municipal and regional elections in May, but was defeated by the verdict of the July polls. In the second round, Spain said no to that view, but the Popular Party seems to have lost control of a war cry once promoted by Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s voracious propaganda team. It is the angry cry of the capital’s right. It’s Milei giving a rally in Argentina with a chainsaw. It is the error that the PSOE expected yesterday.
Socialist presidents have been booed at the October Twelfth party for almost twenty years. It all started in 2004, the year of the great tragedy. The whistles on Paseo de la Castellana, especially intense in the stands occupied by families of military personnel, began after the victory of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in the dramatic general elections of March 14. They grew in the following years, accompanying the processing of the new Statute of Catalonia. They were interrupted after Mariano Rajoy’s victory in the December 2011 elections and reappeared again after the motion of censure won by Pedro Sánchez in May 2018. Until recently, these boos occupied a rather secondary place in journalistic reports. Last year, however, a good part of the capital’s press treated them as an unappealable popular verdict. The good people of Madrid condemned Sánchez. Then came July 23, 2023. And now, the kicking. The holiday of October Twelfth begins to be the day of Booing the Adversary. Spain has pending reflection on the true character of its national holiday.
Princess Leonor was impeccable in her debut as host at the Royal Palace reception, in which the traditional political circles were smaller this time and took place in different spaces. Accompanied by the Queen, the princess spoke with the press in the Columns room, while Pedro Sánchez answered questions in a room adjacent to the gala dining room.
The acting president did not reveal any news about the ongoing negotiations for the investiture, which he described as “complex”, but he dropped, with calculated ambiguity, that he could soon have a telephone conversation with Carles Puigdemont.