The Moncloa and the PSOE leadership cannot believe it, they would never have imagined it. “It is an unusual and unjustifiable fact that an opposition leader does not rush to a meeting called by the President of the Government,” they warn. But it is like this. Pedro Sánchez’s proposal to Alberto Núñez Feijóo to hold a first meeting at the Moncloa in this new mandate, for which he offered up to three possible dates before the end of the year, and to negotiate three specific State pacts in a working committee between his respective parties, there remains no response from the leader of the Popular Party.
“I ask for more agreements and fewer insults!” Sánchez demanded of Feijóo, during the intervention that the PSOE leader made this Saturday at the political convention that the Galician socialists held in Santiago de Compostela, to urge the head of the opposition to accept his invitation to hold this meeting.
“Politics is not about destroying, it is about building. Politics is not a monologue, it is a dialogue. The policy is to agree, and not the permanent tantrum. For this reason, I ask Feijóo and the PP, at the beginning of the legislature, that there be more agreements and fewer insults,” he stated.
In a veiled reproach to Feijóo, Sánchez has thus claimed “useful politics” and his ability to reach agreements with other political families, recently arrived from Brussels, where the day before he received praise from the president of the European Council, the Belgian liberal Charles Michel, and the president of the Commission, the German conservative Ursula von der Leyen, for the achievements achieved during this semester of Spanish presidency of the Council of the European Union.
The Head of the Executive has listed the agreements reached, in the previous legislature, with the unions and employers, with the autonomous communities and city councils, with the Catalan independence groups, in reference to an “agenda of reunion to unite our country”, or with European governments to approve recovery funds. With everyone, therefore, as he wanted to highlight, except with the PP. “It is time to work and agree,” Sánchez insisted, in reference to the three State pacts that he wants to negotiate with Feijóo: the new regional financing system, the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary and the reform of article 49 of the Constitution to eliminate the diminished term in reference to people with disabilities.
“You remember when you respect,” Sánchez warned in any case. And he has pointed out that in the face of the even personal attacks he receives from the right and the extreme right, respect “is a revolution still pending in our democratic system.” “Respect is fundamental, and respect begins with respecting the result of the elections,” said the President of the Government. “And it begins by respecting the legitimacy of a government that has been supported by the representatives of more than 12 million citizens in the Congress of Deputies,” Feijóo warned.
After visiting the facilities of the Navantia shipyard, in Ferrol, Sánchez – in the company of the vice president of the Government and vice general secretary of the PSOE, María Jesús Montero – attended the political convention of the Galician socialists, in Santiago de Compostela, to support the PSdeG candidate for the presidency of the Xunta de Galicia, José Ramón Gómez Besteiro.
The Chief Executive revealed in this event that he offered Besteiro to be a minister, but that the socialist candidate rejected the offer. “When I was forming the Government, I asked him to come as a minister. And you always put yourself in a somewhat tense situation, because saying no to the President of the Government is complicated,” Sánchez acknowledged. “Look, Pedro, no. Because I aspire to be the next president of the Xunta de Galicia,” he stated that Besteiro responded, to try to end fourteen years of PP government in this territory.
