There is no quarter. The PP has failed in the investiture, but that will neither plunge them into depression nor will it give the PSOE a clear path. In the PP they say that they will pay Pedro Sánchez with the same currency that the socialists used during the long month that passed since the King commissioned Alberto Núñez Feijóo to try to form a government and yesterday, in which Congress definitively rejected him as president.
This is what the PP has to do now, popular sources emphasize, “pressure” and do it harshly, trying to “hinder” as much as possible the negotiations with ERC and Junts carried out by Pedro Sánchez to try to form a government, if the King It will be commissioned next week, after the round of consultations that the Monarch will begin on Monday.
How to press? Reminding the PSOE what he said about the amnesty, and what he says now; looking for statements from each other about the self-determination referendum, and what they say now. The popular ones believe that Sánchez will try to present himself as the one who said no to the self-determination referendum, in order to “sneak in” the amnesty without anyone opposing it. If this happens, the PP says that it will be in front to remind Sánchez of what the Government said a while ago about the grace measure from a legal point of view, with reports that considered it “clearly unconstitutional.”
The pressure from the popular people will also be directed at the possibility that the opportunity to hold a self-determination referendum slips into the investiture agreement. In the PP they assure that they will mobilize “all the instruments at their disposal, to say no.”
The pressure methods have already begun to be applied these days of the investiture, and in Genoa they consider that they have had good results. It is not just that the PP is going to come out against the amnesty and the self-determination referendum, it is that, say the sources consulted, they have already seen how the street responds when they are called to say no to the measure of grace.
So harsh words await Sánchez from the PP in the coming weeks. In fact, the popular leader, Núñez Feijóo, already expanded on this yesterday in the speech prior to the vote that caused his investiture to fail. In his last intervention in Congress, the president of the PP directly questioned Sánchez and challenged him to explain to all Spaniards if he is going to grant an amnesty to those responsible for the process and if he is going to allow a self-determination referendum in Catalonia. He had tried it on Tuesday without success, since Sánchez did not go up to the lectern to make a reply to the candidate.
“Come up here now,” Feijóo said yesterday from the Congress rostrum. He does not hide and speaks clearly, without silences, without statements at night full of euphemisms. Go up and say what Spain is going to have to endure if you are president. “Have the courage that you didn’t have on Tuesday and say what you think about the clear and clear demands of the independentists.” Feijóo’s challenge is clear: “Go up and say it clearly. Amnesty yes or no; self-determination referendum yes or no.”
For Feijóo, after the failure of his investiture there are only two ways out “and neither of them is honorable,” he said, because of what they imply. The first, he stressed, would be “a lying government or a repeat election.” He assured that a Sánchez government with the support of ERC and Junts “will be based on lies,” since “either the independentists have lied” if they give in to their demands, or “they will have deceived their voters and the Socialist Party.”
Feijóo maintains that it is more than likely that the acting president is deceiving the PSOE, “hence his silences.” That is why he insisted: “Mr. Sánchez, amnesty yes or no, I say no; self-determination referendum yes or no, Mr. Sánchez, I say no.” The leader of the PP sees it as very possible that Sánchez will be president, but he will be, he said, “at the cost of the dignity and equality of the Spanish people.”
The popular leader also said that the electoral repetition is the “most decorous” option for Sánchez, because “consent for the referendum or amnesty was not requested just two months ago.” In this sense, he called on the socialists to “if they want to do it, achieve it at the polls.”
In yesterday’s session, the president of the PP did not ask any deputy outside the parties that support him to vote, and he rejected that he had encouraged transfuguismo, but he asked the socialists “not to be absconders from their voters, from their principles and transition. Don’t be.”
Of course, in response to proposals that Esperanza Aguirre joined yesterday, that it be the PP that abstains from Sánchez’s investiture, so that it does not depend on the independentists, the popular leader made his position clear. “We are not going to admit the cynicism of them asking us later for what they deny us now. Another step of cynicism, not anymore.”
