This text belongs to the newsletter The Director’s Bulletin, which is sent every Friday morning. If you want to receive it, sign up here.
Good morning,
Significant week for Spanish politics because after months of great political tension, the PSOE reached an agreement with Junts and ERC to approve the Amnesty law. La Vanguardia has editorially defended the path initiated by Pedro Sánchez to reach this goal because we understand that it is the best way to normalize the tense situation that began in this country in 2010 and that has kept us busy and worried for 14 years. It should never have reached the point of absolute failure of dialogue and triumph of confrontation. Some – the PP Government with its paralysis – and others – the independentists with the imposition of their ideas – were to blame for this situation.
Today we see a complicated future, but at least it takes place in a context of negotiation and without unilateralist attitudes on both sides. Last Sunday we already pointed out the possibility of this agreement that was finally closed on Wednesday. During these days, we were privileged witnesses of each other’s movements to achieve this with direct communication with Madrid, Geneva, Brussels, Barcelona and Sant Vicenç dels Horts. A phrase this week from one of these independence negotiators is very significant: “The State is like a house. Now the PSOE is the tenant, with whom we negotiate to change the furniture or paint the walls. But the real owner is the PP. If we want to knock down a wall or renovate the entire house, we have to talk to the owner and not the tenant.” And, in fact, when the old Convergència i Unió managed to eliminate civilian governors or suppress military service, it did so by agreeing with the PP at the Majestic hotel. It is possible that they would never have been able to do it with the socialists, because the protests of the popular ones would have been thunderous.
And the independentistas today have a direct line with the tenant, but they barely speak with the owner. However, there is communication, especially on the part of Junts, although no one wants to admit it. And there will be much more in the future.
But one thing is what the PP is doing discreetly and another is its public discourse. At the summit of the European People’s Party in Bucharest, Alberto Núñez Feijóo was very harsh against the amnesty, which he associated with corruption and considered it a “humiliation” for the Spanish. For two days, the PP found a new way to try to erode the Government so that it was not the Koldo case. Regarding this unfortunate matter for the future of the PSOE, it should be noted that the Executive had to release ballast and make its first high-ranking official, the Secretary General of State Ports, resign due to this scandal.
It has been a week of great tension between the Government and the opposition, as was evident in the Senate plenary session last Tuesday. It is difficult to find a stage in the history of Spain where the PSOE and the PP have maintained a collaborative attitude and it is clear that the current stage is not. It takes us back to 2004 and the intense days after 11-M. There are many political scientists who maintain that a good part of the manifest enmity between these two parties began here, in how the PP did not digest well its unexpected defeat against Zapatero. Certainly the only two departures of the Popular Party from the Government have been surrounded by great controversies: their electoral defeat in 2004, three days after the attack in Atocha, and the motion of censure against Mariano Rajoy in 2018.
Now that 20 years have passed since 11-M, it is worth recognizing the great work of Ignacio Orovio and Gemma Saura in the A Fondo section of La Vanguardia to address the worst terrorist attack suffered in Europe. I already announced that this weekend they will publish interesting news that is compiled in a special section of the website.
These days the attempts of the PP Government to link ETA in the attack have become topical again. In this weekly newsletter that aims to bring how we do our work to all readers, I cannot help but refer to my own experience, then as deputy director of the newspaper’s Politics section. I remember how the then director, José Antich, called me to give me the scoop that the attack had been the work of ETA. His source, as he told me immediately, was José María Aznar himself, who had called him by phone. In the coven – the historical name given to our editorial board at La Vanguardia – the deputy director, Alfredo Abián, a great expert on Basque politics, had expressed his doubts that the authors were ETA members. We had an intense debate and given the doubts, we decided not to make an evening edition, as other colleagues did who put ETA in their big front page headline.
As the hours passed, we confirmed that the clues led more to Islamic terrorists and we confirmed this in the following day’s edition. But the most exciting moment I remember was the next day when the battle for the story between ETA and Al Qaeda was crucial and the Government was putting maximum pressure on all the media to remain faithful to the line it wanted to impose. Their message: there were two lines of investigation, but they were completely sure that the authorship was ETA. In the editorial office at that time, still in the historic headquarters on Pelai Street, as deputy editor I had to write the front page of the newspaper and, given the evidence and data that my colleagues provided me, I wrote the title: “The evidence points to Al Qaeda but the “Government insists on ETA.” Aware of the pressures on my director, I was completely convinced that Antich would soften me up or change the headline. He did not do it. And we were one of the few who came out with this double idea.
Twenty years later, I confirm that some temptations to manipulate reality are still fully valid. Happy Friday.
