For weeks now, Pedro Sánchez, and everyone in Moncloa and Ferraz, had been wondering whether or not the acting President of the Government would personally respond to Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s speech in response to his investiture attempt doomed to failure. To feed the expectation, they alleged. And the coup d’effect that Sánchez had in store for this afternoon has, indeed, surprised everyone. Not only Feijóo himself, but also in the PSOE bench. On behalf of the socialist group, thus, it was not Sánchez who spoke, but rather its most aggressive and combative spokesperson: the former mayor of Valladolid Óscar Puente. The most appropriate profile, in the opinion of Sánchez’s team, to put the leader of the Popular Party “in front of the mirror of all his contradictions”, and to blow up the “house of cards” of his demand that the most voted list govern.
“You are neither president nor trustworthy,” Puente concluded to reaffirm the PSOE’s rejection of Feijóo’s investiture, at the end of an impetuous intervention that has delighted Sánchez and the socialist bench, and that has also It drew applause even among Podemos leaders. “He does not have support to be president of the Government, and very soon he will not have any to continue presiding over his party,” he warned the leader of the PP, whom he reproached for “not coming to command, but to obey,” José María Aznar. or Isabel Díaz Ayuso.
“He has not yet learned to lose, and it is in the opposition where he has political stature,” Puente told Feijóo. He has thus highlighted that he himself was the candidate with the most votes in the last municipal elections in Valladolid, the capital of which he had been mayor since 2015. But the alliance of the PP and the far-right Vox evicted him from office. “From winner to winner, Mr. Feijóo. Since we are on equal terms, why do you think you have more right to govern than me?” he called on the candidate for the investiture. It is the same case as the winner of the elections in Toledo, Milagros Tolón, or in Extremadura, Guillermo Fernández Vara, who lost their governments to the opposing majority of the right. It is the same thing that is happening now to Feijóo, who won the last general elections, but he does not have the necessary parliamentary support to govern. “Your argument fails, since it is openly unconstitutional,” Puente replied to Feijóo.
“He defends an idea and practices the opposite,” the socialist spokesperson reproached the leader of the PP, demanding that the list with the most votes govern, while after the municipal and regional elections he reproached him for “having displaced the most voted and integrated party.” without shame to the extreme right” wherever he could. “I recognized my defeat, despite being the most voted. In a parliamentary democracy, whoever manages to form a government wins,” he highlighted.
Puente has accused Feijóo of “arrogance”, “self-deception”, “living in lies”, and paying homage to Vox. “The PP is so degraded that it has ended up being parasitized by the extreme right,” he denounced.
Puente has attacked Feijóo forcefully. He has reproached him for not being a candidate for his investiture as president, but for simply being the “head of the opposition.” And he has warned him about the crime of constitutional disloyalty proposed by the PP leader, after five years of blocking the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary. “Be careful: if this crime were to be created, in the current circumstances, you might be the first accused,” he warned her. And he has once again recalled “his close friendship with a drug trafficker”, in a veiled allusion to Marcial Dorado, in addition to his belonging “to the most rancid PP in its history, that of Galicia, that great family portrayed in Fariña” .
Puente has also denounced the PP’s attempt to provoke a “rebellion” in the PSOE, seeking to stage a new tamayazo, like the one that prevented the socialist Rafael Simancas from being president of the Community of Madrid in 2003. “Lose all hope of “Break this PSOE,” he warned the popular bench. “It may not be the same PSOE from 30 years ago, but don’t get nostalgic, because they did the same thing to the PSOE from 30 years ago, although some of those who led it then seem to have forgotten it,” he also reproached Felipe González. and Alfonso Guerra. “None is anymore representative of this PSOE, which has already protected itself against external interference. This PSOE belongs to its militants, and therefore to the people,” he defended.
