Mission accomplished, they celebrate in Moncloa. Pedro Sánchez appeared on Tuesday night on the Antena 3 program El Hormiguero, with the manifest desire to “refute”, in prime time and before a wide television audience -and possibly not very similar to the President of the Government-, many of the “lies, manipulations and evils” that he warns are inflating “the bubble of sanchismo” with which the political and media right-wing has attacked him daily for five years. And he has tried to refute it with the utmost forcefulness.
“I don’t recognize myself in many of the things they say about me,” Sánchez admitted, about what a mostly conservative “published opinion” says and very different in his opinion from “public opinion”, as Felipe González already warned in Your day. The chief executive recalled the irony of Barack Obama in the face of the avalanche of lies that the ultra-conservative media outlet Fox News poured out about him: “I wouldn’t have voted myself.”
Sánchez has thus firmly refuted, to begin with, that he has brought forward the general elections to next July 23 to commit “electoral fraud” and to try to “alter the result” of this appointment with the polls, as it is held in the middle of summer. Also from the Popular Party and related media, he has highlighted, they accused him of seeking an “electoral punch” in the recent municipal and regional elections on May 28. “We live in a full and strong democracy, we are one of the main democracies in the world. Why do we have to undermine the foundations of democracy, the confidence of citizens in our democratic system, simply to harm your political adversary? ”, He replied.
The President of the Government has also rejected that he lied, when changing his position on matters of relevance to the political conflict in Catalonia. “Lying is saying something you know is not true with the intent to deceive,” he explained. And he has wondered if Adolfo Suárez lied when he assured that he was not going to legalize the PCE, as he later did, or if Felipe González did when he initially rejected Spain’s entry into NATO, for which he later bet in a referendum. “That is not lying, it is rectifying”, Sánchez assured. And he has highlighted that these rectifications, in his opinion, were very positive for Spain.
“Lying, for me, is March 11, knowing that the person behind it is not ETA, and saying that the perpetrators of the biggest attack that Spain has suffered are just in distant mountains of Spain,” Sánchez assured, referring to José María Aznar, who attributed the 2004 massacre to the terrorist group. “That is lying”, he has settled.
“Rectifying, at a time like the current one that we have experienced a pandemic and now a war, is in the DNA of a politician, because we have to adapt to reality,” he defended. And, thus, he has justified his change of position to try to solve the territorial conflict in Catalonia. “I have rectified, I have made different decisions than what I said before the elections, but the result is that today there is greater tranquility in Catalan society and that the first political force in Catalonia is a constitutionalist force, the Socialist Party, which defends unit”. He has thus justified the pardons for the imprisoned leaders of the procés or the repeal of the crime of sedition. And he has assured that if he manages to revalidate the position on July 23, there will be no self-determination referendum in Catalonia.
“During these five years, no self-determination referendum has been held in Catalonia, and when the PP governed, two were held,” he stressed. And he has insisted that “no Constitution recognizes the right of a territory to secede from its country.” Sánchez has also stated that a referendum on self-determination contradicts the main political argument that he has deployed since he was president in Catalonia and in the rest of Spain: “Coexistence.” “Dividing Catalan society between whether you are pro-independence or not is to go back to a mistake that we have already overcome,” he stressed.
The head of the Executive has assured that “the main mistake that was committed by the previous administration is to prosecute a political conflict that should have been resolved through political means.” “The Constitution gives us a button that is 155”, he highlighted “as a political solution to a territorial challenge caused by the independentistas”. Article 155, he has insisted, is “a political button to intervene, from a political point of view, a government that clearly breaks the law.”
Sánchez has once again assumed “full responsibility, in the first person”, for the perverse effects of the only yes is yes law, which caused the sentences of a thousand sexual offenders to be lowered. “We made a mistake,” he admitted. But he has stressed that, although he should have acted before, he rectified that error with a reform of the law. And he has defended, in any case, as “frankly notable” the feminist agenda and in favor of gender equality that his government has deployed in these years, in the face of the setback that he has attributed to the pacts between the PP and Vox.
The President of the Government has called to avoid equating the leader of Vox with that of Sumar, at both ends of the spaces led by the PP and the PSOE. “I would not compare Yolanda Díaz with Santiago Abascal”, he has defended. “I know of the good work of him”, has highlighted his second vice president. And he has refused to abstain, if the PP wins the elections, to make it easier for Alberto Núñez Feijóo to govern without Vox. “The pact proposed by the PP is quite curious: that the PP always govern”, he ironized. “Whoever wants to avoid a PP government with Vox, vote for the PSOE”, he has settled.
