The indignation was absolute in the Moncloa when listening last Thursday to Alberto Núñez Feijóo disqualify, and precisely from Brussels, the pension reform approved by the Government with the endorsement of the European Council itself. This was forcefully conveyed by both Vice President Nadia Calviño and Minister José Luis Escrivá. But today, from the very heart of the community club, it has been Pedro Sánchez who has condemned the attitude of the leader of the Popular Party. The head of the Executive has denounced, this Friday at the end of the European Council meeting, the “lack of patriotism” of the current leader of the main opposition party in Spain, even greater, in his opinion, than the one he has already attributed to his predecessor in office, Pablo Casado. “Casado’s disloyalty has been overcome by Feijóo,” Sánchez lamented. Never, he has assured, would he have imagined it.
Sánchez has highlighted that Feijóo took advantage of his recent visit to Brussels to criticize the reform of the public pension system in Spain, agreed with the community institutions, “with whoever he could”. Among them, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von del Leyen, and the Commissioner for the Economy, Paolo Gentiloni. “I thought that the disloyalty with Spain was never going to be overcome in the case of Casado. But we have seen, quite clearly and quite embarrassingly, that this disloyalty has been overcome by Feijóo ”, warned the President of the Government.
And he has linked this critical position of Feijóo in Brussels with the unsuccessful motion of no confidence promoted by the extreme right of Vox. This initiative, Sánchez reiterated, was not to call early elections, “but to stop the progressive public policy actions that this government is implementing.” But, in his opinion, if Vox’s approach was to take Spain back 50 years, Feijóo’s is to go back 10 years. Specifically, until the pension reform of 2013 promoted by the Executive of Mariano Rajoy, “based on a model of precariousness and cuts in the welfare state.” “It is important to underline, both in substance and in form, the lack of patriotism and the return to a past from which we have happily overcome the most adverse consequences”, he celebrated.
Sánchez recalled that Rajoy’s pension reform was approved “unilaterally”, thanks to the absolute majority enjoyed by the PP in 2013. The current reform, already approved by the Council of Ministers, has warned that it will be validated in Congress “by deputies from many more parliamentary groups, after having the agreement of the trade unions. And also, he has highlighted, “has the endorsement of community institutions.”
“It is evident that today there is social peace, which is essential for reforms of this magnitude, as was the labor reform. But then, in 2013, there was no social peace”, stressed the head of the Executive. “What there was was a very majority social response, which transcended the political space of progressivism in Spain,” he warned. A very large majority of Spaniards, he has recalled, “did not want to see their pensions cut and frozen.” The leader of the PP, lamented Sánchez, has gone to Brussels “to try to question the agreements that the Government of Spain has reached with the community institutions.” “And that is disloyalty, not to the Government but to the country,” he has settled.
Sánchez has launched a question: “Why do reforms always cause social pain for the right?” “There can be reforms, in favor of the social majority of the country, as the Government of Spain is doing, that do not have to cause social pain.
