It has been kept secret until the last moment. The surprise came at the restart of the investiture session of Alberto Núñez Feijóo after 3:30 in the afternoon, when the president of Congress, Francina Armengol, announced that the person in charge of replying to the candidate would not be the general secretary of the PSOE and president of the Acting Government, Pedro Sánchez, but the deputy and former mayor of Valladolid, Óscar Puente.
After the spokesperson for the socialist group, Patxi López, had recently made a first assessment of the PP leader’s speech, everything indicated that Sánchez would speak in plenary, but that was not the case. Puente’s choice was not trivial. With it, the PSOE intended to put the popular candidate, whom they accuse of wasting the time of the Chamber and the Spaniards with this investiture debate, in front of the mirror, since the former mayor of Valladolid, a first-time Sanchista, lost his position after the municipal elections on May 28 despite winning the elections thanks to the addition of PP and Vox. “From winner to winner,” Puente sarcastically reminded Feijóo.
However, Óscar Puente (Valladolid, 1968), a member of the PSOE since 1990, became mayor of Valladolid in 2015, obtaining the lowest number of votes in the history of the PSOE in the Castilian-Leonese capital and in second position behind the PP in his second attempt after agreeing with Podemos and IU. In 2019, the people of Valladolid endorsed his government, once again giving victory to the PSOE, something that had not happened since 1987.
As an anecdote, Puente faced the last municipal campaign in poor conditions. Two weeks after starting, he suffered a fall while visiting the works in the Parquesol neighborhood that he himself had promoted and broke his quadriceps femoris, which is why he had to undergo surgery.
After losing the mayoralty despite winning, he had no qualms about accepting it although he left a sentence that sounded like exculpation. “The national dynamic has overwhelmed governments like ours, which I believe were well valued by citizens. “It is a very good result, but it is insufficient.” Feijóo reminded him of this in his reply, seeing in the phrase an indictment of Sánchez.
As he demonstrated this Tuesday, Puente has a biting verb. Spokesperson for Pedro Sánchez’s candidacy for the general secretary of the PSOE in 2017, she declared that the party had to look to the left, stating that the PSOE was then “with its ass poised to the right.” This Tuesday he warned Feijóo not to waste time looking for deserters among the socialists because this PSOE “shielded itself” years ago against any external interference and “consequently”, in an apparent attack on the former president of the government Felipe González, “is no longer of its leaders, neither current nor historical, but of its militants, of the people”.
After the departure from the PSOE of Soraya Rodríguez, her predecessor at the head of the PSOE in Valladolid who is now an MEP for Ciudadanos, in March 2019, Puente stated that “we are not going to miss her”, adding that “the real socialists, only in the PSOE, never outside the PSOE”.
