“This is getting worse, I don’t know what show we are putting on or what each other wants,” Aitor Esteban lamented this Wednesday. The PNV spokesperson thus showed notable irritation as he left the chamber, after attending, stupefied – like other parliamentary spokespersons and even ministers of the PSOE – a new Government control session in Congress in which Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo They intensified their particular all-out war due to the alleged corruption scandals that plague the PSOE and the Popular Party. And in the Senate, at the same time, clashes between both parties that were equally bitter and harsh occurred this Wednesday.
In a climate that many call unbreathable, and with the playing field completely muddy, the anger over corruption already overflows the Koldo case and the scandal that affects Isabel Díaz Ayuso, and breaks into the personal sphere not only of the president of the Community of Madrid, by also putting the respective wives of the President of the Government and the leader of the main opposition party in the target of the contenders.
The fight began with Feijóo, who reproached Sánchez for the same thing that the PSOE leader reproached Mariano Rajoy in 2018: “Governing is not living in Moncloa.” But the Chief Executive responded by immediately attacking the case of alleged corruption of Ayuso’s partner. “Indeed, governing is not living in Moncloa. Nor can living in two apartments valued at more than two million euros paid largely for tax fraud to the Treasury,” Sánchez charged.
The leader of the PP then pressed the accelerator. “It is full of corruption. He is very nervous and does well, he has reasons. That’s why he desperately puts the fan on,” Feijóo warned him. And if last week, when the all-out war broke out between the two in this same parliamentary control session, Sánchez wanted to knock him out by demanding courage to demand Ayuso’s resignation, this time it was Feijóo who wanted to beat him on points, putting the target on to the president’s wife, Begoña Gómez. “If he believes that he has resolved the doubts of what has happened in his government and in his party, he is wrong. If he believes that he has shelved what happened in his house, he is also wrong,” he warned her.
And he crowned his intervention with a full-fledged threat: “If he refuses to give explanations again, and I ask him three times, there will be a specific investigation into the matters that affect his immediate environment. Parliamentarian, for sure. And judicial too if necessary. The Spaniards will be certain that they will know everything,” Feijóo announced.
The leader of the PP thus put the alleged connection of Sánchez’s wife with Air Europa into the focus of the political anger, before the airline’s financial rescue during the pandemic.
The President of the Government once again called on Feijóo to “stand up to corruption in his party: demand Ayuso’s resignation as president of the Community of Madrid.” But, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, later the first vice president of the Government, María Jesús Montero, denied any irregularity in the rescue of this airline, but warned that “Feijóo’s wife received help from the Xunta.” The Government spokesperson, Pilar Alegría, already demanded explanations from the current leader of the PP the day before, after it was revealed that, as president of Galicia, the Xunta granted at least 114,000 euros in subsidies to Sagardelos, the company in which her husband worked. partner, Eva Cárdenas.
The abrupt parliamentary day recorded another succession of clashes, given the offensive by land, sea and air of the PP against the Government for alleged cases of corruption. “They come to throw garbage on me, they don’t come to clean, they come to dirty,” denounced the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, in response to the PP’s repeated demands for explanations for the Koldo case. “Shame, shame!” burst out the Minister of Equality, Ana Redondo, in response to the PP’s attacks against the president’s “spouse” when trying to link her to “disgusting cases of corruption.”
In the Upper House, at the same time, PP senator Raúl Valero accused the PSOE of spending the money from the fraudulent ERE in Andalusia on “hostel clubs, seafood restaurants and drugs.” “You scoundrel!” they accused him from the socialist bench. “Why don’t you come down here and tell me to my face?” challenged the PP senator. And the tuning fork of political anger soared again in the Senate.
