Already at the gates of the disputed new electoral cycle in Spain, which will determine the re-election of the first or the consecration of the second, Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo resolve their bitter political struggle in Brussels.
The indignation was absolute in Moncloa when they heard Feijóo disqualify, precisely from the heart of the community club, the pension reform approved by the central government with the endorsement of the European Council itself. A mere “patch”, or a “mistake”, by the leader of the PP, who defended a reform like that of Emmanuel Macron in France, which has set fire to the neighboring country.
Sánchez forcefully rebuked Feijóo’s attitude, also from Brussels, yesterday at the end of the European Council meeting and before crossing the Atlantic to accompany the King to the Ibero-American Summit in Santo Domingo. The president denounced the “lack of patriotism” of the current leader of the main opposition party, even greater, in his opinion, than he already attributed to his predecessor in the PP, Pablo Casado. “Casado’s disloyalty has been overcome by Feijóo”, he lamented. Never, he assured, would he have imagined it.
Sánchez emphasized that Feijóo took advantage of the visit to Brussels to criticize the pension reform in Spain, agreed with the community institutions, “with whoever he could”. Among them, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von del Leyen, and Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni. “I thought that Casado’s disloyalty would never be overcome. But we have seen, quite shamefully, that that disloyalty has been overcome by Feijóo”, he added.
And he linked this critical position of Feijóo with the fiasco of the censure motion promoted by the ultra-right, with which Sánchez aligns the leader of the PP for future post-electoral pacts. In his opinion, if Santiago Abascal proposes that Spain go back 50 years, Feijóo wants to go back ten years. Specifically, until Mariano Rajoy’s pension reform in 2013, “based on a model of precariousness and cuts to the welfare state”. “It is important to underline the lack of patriotism and the return to a past whose most adverse consequences we have happily overcome”, celebrated the president.
Sánchez avoided evaluating the Airef’s adverse report on his pension reform. But he emphasized that compared to Rajoy’s “unilateral” initiative, which was approved by the absolute majority that the PP enjoyed in 2013, his not only has the agreement of the unions and a parliamentary majority that will validate it, but it also “has the support of the community institutions”. The president emphasized the “social peace” that prevails after his labor and pension reform, in the face of the “social contestation” that the policies of the PP obtained. “Why do reforms always have to cause social pain for the right?”, he demanded.
The head of the Executive also insisted on attributing to Feijóo the blocking of the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary, which accumulates “more than four years and four months” with the expired mandate, despite the demands of the EU . Sánchez already considered an agreement in this legislature impossible with a PP that, he denounced, “want to have the governing body of the judges intervened politically”. The reason would be to preserve an assumed “natural order”, according to which “conservatism monopolizes the Judiciary” in Spain. “It is unacceptable”, he warned. But he sees no alternative to this blockade.
