“Long live Spain!” Ramón Tamames and Santiago Abascal, together with the rest of the Vox deputies, chanted in unison in the family photo for which they posed satisfied in the congressional chamber at the end of the vote on the motion of no confidence that they raised against Pedro Sánchez and that ended with a resounding failure.
The outlandish result of the debate, however, was not made profitable by the main potential beneficiary of Vox’s tremendous miscalculation, the Popular Party, with its leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, engrossed in a European agenda. And all this just two months after the municipal and regional elections on May 28.
“Long live the motion!” Cheered the far-right deputies, despite the fact that the initiative was only supported by the proponent group itself, that is, the 52 deputies of the formation led by Abascal, with the only added ballot of Pablo Cambronero , a former defecting deputy from Ciudadanos now attached to the mixed group. In total, 53 yeses. out of 350.
In the middle, in a difficult balancing act, 91 abstentions. Those of the 88 seats of the PP of Feijóo, together with the two deputies expelled from the UPN, Carlos García Adanero and Sergio Sayas – who will already present themselves for the PP in the Navarrese elections – and the representative of Foro Asturias, Isidro Martínez Oblanca. All of them rejected the previous invitation that Abascal sent them: “Let’s vote together today to understand each other tomorrow.”
“We are not going to vote in favor of this motion out of respect for the Spanish people and we are not going to vote against this motion out of respect for Tamames,” PP spokeswoman Cuca Gamarra justified yesterday. “Spain is waiting for an alternative, but it’s not you,” he clarified to the veteran economist.
Gamarra reproached Vox for what he called an “idle motion” – a term that annoyed the failed candidate – because in his opinion it grants “momentary relief to this agonizing government.” “An inexplicable gift to the Government, which will be able to exhibit a unit that it does not have,” Gamarra warned, before the staging of the cohesion of the coalition Executive that Pedro Sánchez and Vice President Yolanda Díaz exhibited the day before.
“Mission accomplished!”, instead they clamored in Moncloa, as soon as the president of Congress, Meritxell Batet, certified the death of Vox’s motion of censure, adding up to 201 votes against, those of the rest of the groups of the camera. “This reformist project of social advances is strong, with more desire than ever to continue advancing,” Sánchez celebrated in her final speech.
The president thanked the vast majority of Congress for rejecting a “rocambolesque attempt to stop our country in its tracks and to overthrow a legitimate government, be it from the yes or from the abstention,” he said, referring to the positions of Vox and the PP.
Sánchez returned to focus on the absence of Feijóo, in addition to the abstention of the PP. “Feijóo is silent because he knows that he needs Vox to be able to govern,” he denounced. “But no one can put themselves in profile or be equidistant, one cannot be indifferent to a constitutional fraud like the one we have experienced with this scorched earth motion,” he warned.
In the Moncloa they showed their satisfaction because they understood that all their objectives had been achieved. In the first place, for being able to highlight the action of the Government – ??“it is always good, because the news is amortized in 24 hours”, they argue before the list of approved measures in which they can hardly recreate –, and also to capture an image of internal cohesion thanks to the alliance between Pedro Sánchez and Yolanda Díaz.
“The coalition comes out reinforced, consolidated and synchronized”, they insist, however, in Moncloa, after a debate that they highlight that aroused great interest in the public – only on TVE it had a 24% audience – and that they also consider that “it mobilizes the electorate progressive”, already before the next appointment with the polls of 28-M and also facing the general elections in December. In the Government they also underline that Feijóo “is touched” from a debate in which he did not want to be Vox’s stone guest. “The PP is linked to the extreme right with an abstention that tries to legitimize Vox in the face of the electoral situation, which is irresponsible,” they denounce.
The offense of the right, together or separately, is always the best glue for the left. But from Podemos, however, the ministers Irene Montero and Ione Belarra called on the PSOE to go once and for all “from words to deeds.” “The facts are the laws and decrees that protect the vast majority of the population,” the Socialists replied.
The final day, moreover, left another picturesque intervention by Tamames, who put both those who voted yes and the abstentionists in a bind, with their unique approaches to national and international politics. Sprinkling his speech with anecdotes and memories of people he met, he stressed that he had found the speech by Mireia Vehí, spokesperson for the CUP, very interesting, “on everything related to the question of Catalonia” – to the astonishment of the deputies of the CUP and the horror of those from Vox– and once again proclaimed the Spanishness of Gibraltar as the great affront suffered by the homeland.
A hilarious moment was his response to the PNV spokesman, Aitor Esteban, to whom he spoke of his respect for the Basque, of when he frequented Baroja and narrated his prison companionship in 1976 with prisoners from the ETA commune in Carabanchel, to whom he gave economic talks. In a chamber in which the former spokesperson for the PP Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo called the father of the then Vice President of the Government, Pablo Iglesias, a “terrorist” for distributing communist leaflets in 1973, the body of the deputies of Vox and the PP the familiarity that Tamames boasted with the ETA prisoners a year after Franco’s death.
It was not clear if Tamames was happy with the experience. On the one hand, he assured that the attitude of the spokespersons towards him “is not a way to receive anyone, let alone a candidate”, and on the other, he said that the public impact of the motion proves the country’s political “liveliness”. Antonio Gala wrote decades ago that the risk of eating the last almond in the jar is that, if it is bitter, there is no other to mitigate that sourness.
