No one can doubt the intentions of Alberto Núñez Feijóo in relation to Catalonia, least of all within the PP, warn party sources, who emphasize that, from the moment Carles Puigdemont set out his conditions for the investiture, the popular leader he roundly opposed it. He made it clear that they are unacceptable and that any relationship with the Junts parliamentary group would require a waiver of the agenda proposed by the former president from Brussels.
Feijóo believed and continues to believe that the amnesty for those accused in the facts of the process was illegal and the self-determination referendum is in no way compatible with the Constitution. In short, he maintains intact his resounding no to any of the four conditions set out by Puigdemont in Tuesday’s exhibition.
The president of the PP, in an interview on Antena 3’s Espejo Público program, explained that what Puigdemont intends to do in his opinion is “return the 155 to the State” through an “intervention by the State itself” thanks to the fact that his votes are now decisive for the investiture of one of the two candidates, himself and Pedro Sánchez.
The popular leader recalled in this interview that the former president lost his position in application of article 155 of the Constitution agreed in the Senate, with the votes in favor of the PP and also the PSOE, while in Parliament a failed declaration of independence. For the president of the PP, Puigdemont does not intend anything other than to climb over now and fears that his rival, Sánchez, will allow him to do so. For Feijóo, if the current acting president gives in, “the blackmail will last the entire legislature”.
That is why Feijóo again insisted on extending his hand to the PSOE to achieve an investment agreed between the two major parties, with the votes of the constitutionalists, who represent, according to his accounts, “94% of the Spanish vote, while the pro-independence only 6%”.
The popular leader referred again to his statement, made on Wednesday in the Canary Islands, when he offered to “find a solution for the territorial problem of Catalonia”. A term he used, he assured, “because it is what the pro-independence people use”.
Feijóo stressed that, in any case, when he expressed his willingness to seek a solution to the dispute, he was thinking of the PSOE, in the pact he has been demanding for weeks, and pointed out that the most important thing in the controversial sentence was what he said immediately afterwards: any agreement on this issue “is either made through a State pact or it is not made; either it is within the Constitution or it will not be, or it is in accordance with the law or it will not be”.
The president of the PP did not want to advance further in this proposal that he hopes – as he said in the Canary Islands – to be able to present to the PSOE before the investiture debate is held at the end of this month.
In any case, he assured that everything he exposed is what he has “always” said and, consequently, no one in his party can be surprised. There are no discrepancies, he assured, in the PP. And if there were, in any case, they do not have the entity of those that are observed within the PSOE, in which the dissensions are more than notorious after listening to the recent interventions of Felipe González, Alfonso Guerra or other leaders such as former ministers Ramón Jáuregui and Jordi Sevilla.
What’s more, Feijóo attributed the step back of the one who was president of the Congress in the last legislature, Meritxell Batet, to those discrepancies. She, affirmed Feijóo, “was respectful of the lawyers’ report that two years ago, in 2021, said that the initiative presented by Junts and ERC in which amnesty was defended could not be accepted for processing” and now , he stressed, “she must attend perplexed that a colleague (Francina Armengol) does the opposite”.
