The most baffling strategies are sometimes the right ones. I read it in Woody Allen in his memoirs, when he explains that on the Saturday he wanted to start his relationship with Soon Yi he took her to see The Seventh Seal, a Bergman film, slow, dense and presumptuous ( and black and white), which allowed him to lecture on Kierkegaard. She, instead of telling him that it was late and still had to go to the supermarket, listened obediently, prepared to be kissed and then said: “I was wondering when you would make the move.” Well yes, sometimes (rarely I swear) watching a Swedish film and talking about a Danish theologian can be used to bond.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo paid attention to Allen: he refused to go to Congress to hear Vox’s motion of no confidence against Pedro Sánchez and, instead, went to lunch at the Swedish embassy and did the swedish Like Bergman. And he talked with European diplomats, also with the Danish ambassador with whom he could have talked about Kierkegaard. And it went well for him, not because he tied up with anyone, but because he detached himself from a parliamentary session that could complicate his existence. There were nicer places to go than Congress without being a member, because as a guest you could touch his face and, on the other hand, he couldn’t defend himself.
The PP has not been interested in this motion of censure at all. And it has bothered him more than it seems. He had little to gain and a lot to lose. Sánchez and Yolanda Díaz won the vote by a wide margin, but they were also delighted to have met each other. The equidistance in the form of popular abstention left them in no man’s land. Even though Cuca Gamarra announced from his seat as the herald of the apocalypse “the end of his disastrous adventure” and the “most chaotic and unstable government in the EU”.
The motion was the beginning of the May election campaign and it went well for the left. Vox has shot itself in the foot with its parliamentary vaudeville and the PP trusts that its centrality will allow them to rise in the polls to the detriment of Abascal’s party. Kierkegaard already said it: “Most men pursue success with such haste that, in their haste, they pass it by.”
