The campaign for the municipal and regional elections on May 28 moved yesterday to the Senate, where Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo fought their last bitter parliamentary duel before this appointment with the polls. But the President of the Government and the leader of the Popular Party intensified their political struggle with a battery of mutual reproaches and disqualifications, already with the horizon of the general elections scheduled for December.

“This is too big for him or it is far away,” warned Sánchez, before Feijóo’s claim to evict him from Moncloa. “He will not be able to stop the force of change that Spain wants,” the leader of the PP warned him in turn, who advanced “the most urgent reform” that he will undertake if he becomes president of the Government: “Repeal sanchismo.” “If Spain wants change, we will repeal sanchismo,” he insisted. Not only to reverse the vast majority of the policies of the coalition government, which he portrayed as an Executive “divided, without leadership and kidnapped” by the independence movement and populism, but to repeal “his way of doing politics”, in his opinion chaired by for the “arrogance”. “Her government of hers is broken,” he certified.

“His leap into national politics has been a disappointment,” the PSOE leader replied. “The Galicians have won and all the Spaniards have lost,” said Sánchez ironically, after Feijóo’s 13 years of absolute majorities at the head of the Xunta de Galicia before taking over from Pablo Casado as head of the main opposition party. “He has extended Casado’s insulting style”, Sánchez reproached a Feijóo whom he drew as “irritated, aggressive and frustrated”, with a “faltón tone”, and folded to the extreme right of Vox.

Willing to maintain the initiative and impose his political agenda, in the face of a Feijóo whom the Socialists see “in the wake” of his successive announcements, Sánchez took the opportunity to insist on confronting his commitment to deploy “the largest expansion of the public housing stock for rent ” of democracy with the “neoliberal model” that he attributed to the PP and that he equated with the “culture of pitching, corruption and speculation” based on the Land Law of José María Aznar in 1998. Sánchez thus announced that the Executive will promote another 20,000 new public and affordable rental homes, through the public company Sepes, on land owned by the Ministry of Defence, which is one of the main landowners in Spain. An additional project to the Campamento operation, in Madrid, already unlocked after long decades of delays, which provides for the promotion of 12,000 homes.

Sánchez pulled on the calculator to highlight his ad. These new 20,000 flats on Defense land will be added to the 50,000 public housing for affordable rental from Sareb and the 43,000 that will be financed with ICO loans worth 4,000 million euros. In total, 113,000 public flats announced in the last ten days. Together with the Ministry of Transport’s affordable rental housing plan, the global figure rises to 183,000 flats. And Sánchez contrasted this figure with the 1,600 public homes projected during the two legislatures of Mariano Rajoy’s mandate, between 2011 and 2018.

“This seems like the miracle of breads and floors!” Feijóo ironized. And he denounced that Sánchez “is living on debt and deficit.” “It’s impossible to beat him in demagogy!” he cried. And he counterattacked with the reform of the law of the only yes is yes, which will go ahead thanks to the PP despite the resistance of United We Can. “I will support the fact that the sentence for pedophiles and rapists is not cheaper,” he confirmed. “You’re welcome, you don’t need to thank me,” he told the PSOE leader. And he insisted that responsibilities be cleared up: “Either stop someone at once or leave yourself.” But Sánchez defended his correction of the norm: “When one makes a mistake, it is best to rectify it.” “I have publicly apologized to the victims,” he recalled.

And he in turn demanded that Feijóo withdraw the initiative of the Andalusian president, Juanma Moreno Bonilla, to regularize illegal irrigation in Doñana, questioned by the European Commission. But the PP leader replied: “Don’t use Doñana as an electoral trigger!” A demand that he warned is not his, but Alfonso Guerra’s.