“I have decided to continue with more strength at the head of the presidency of the Government”, Pedro Sánchez announced yesterday. In a brief appearance at noon from the steps of the Moncloa palace, which he wanted to cover with solemnity, he thus clarified the unknown about a resignation that he himself promoted on Wednesday, due to the harassment against his wife, which he attributes to the right. Already at night, on TVE, Sánchez assured that Begoña Gómez was the first to tell him not to resign.
Five days of absolute uncertainty about continuing in office were resolved, in this way, with Sánchez’s commitment to promote a generic regeneration of democracy. The decision to remain in office, he assured, “does not mean a full stop, it is a full stop”. But in the evening interview on public television, he barely mentioned the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary, for which he did open the door to the latest unblocking proposal by its acting president, Vicente Guilarte , and asked to open a debate to avoid disinformation in the media. “I assume my commitment to work non-stop, with firmness and serenity, for the pending regeneration of our democracy, and for the advancement and consolidation of rights and freedoms”, he said in the morning from Moncloa.
Therefore, there is no resignation of the president, no government in office, no search for a new investiture, no hasty succession, no motion of confidence, no early elections, and none of the speculations to which Sánchez himself opened the door with last week’s announcement. Despite the enormous relief expressed by everyone in the Government and the PSOE, struck by vertigo in the face of an abyss, Alberto Núñez Feijóo and the entire Popular Party came out en masse to ridicule the president’s decision. Also Sumar, a member of the Government coalition, demanded that Sánchez give content to the vague commitment to regeneration. And some parliamentary members, such as ERC, expressed their displeasure, in the middle of the electoral campaign in Catalonia.
Sánchez went, first of all, to inform Felipe VI of the decision to continue in office, in the same way that last week he conveyed his doubts to him. And finally the appearance in Moncloa, initially announced for twelve, was brought forward to eleven in the morning, which was resolved with a statement of just eight minutes, without the presence of the press. The president, as usual, once again broke all the forecasts: even the Government and the PSOE had already established the impression that he would resign.
Sánchez thanked the “shows of solidarity and empathy” he has received these five days, particularly from the PSOE, which on Saturday issued unanimous and massive support for him not to resign. “This social mobilization has decisively influenced my thinking”, he acknowledged.
Sánchez recalled the surprising letter to the public that he distributed on Wednesday, in which he considered “whether it was worth enduring the harassment that the family has been suffering for ten years in exchange for presiding over the Government”. “After these days of reflection, I have a clear answer”, he assured yesterday.
“No matter how high it is, there is no honor that justifies the unjust suffering of the people you love and respect the most, and to see how you try to destroy their dignity without any foundation,” he alleged. “I needed to stop and reflect”, he justified, and admitted that this parenthesis created confusion, but he insisted that he did not obey “any political calculation”. “There are times when the only way to move forward is to stop, reflect and decide clearly where we want to go”, he defended.
And he posed a dilemma: “Either we say enough or this degradation of public life will determine our future by condemning us as a country.” “This is not an ideological issue, it has nothing to do with the legitimate debate between political options. It has to do with the rules of the game”, he pointed out.
“If we allow deliberate falsehoods to direct the political debate, if we force the victims of these lies to have to prove their innocence against the most elementary rule of the State of Law, if we allow the paper to be relegated of the woman in the domestic sphere having to sacrifice her professional career for the benefit of her husband’s, if they allow the unreasonableness to become routine, the consequence will be that we will have done irreparable harm to our democracy”, he emphasized . “To demand unconditional resistance from the leaders who are the object of this strategy is to put the focus on the victims, and not on the aggressors”, he warned.
“My wife and I know that this campaign of discredit will not stop. We have been living it for ten years. It’s serious, but we can deal with it”, assured Sánchez. And he warned that the only way to turn the situation around is for “the social majority to mobilize in a determined commitment to dignity and common sense, putting a stop to the politics of shame that we have been suffering for too long”. “This is not about the fate of a particular leader, it is the least important, it is about deciding what kind of society we want to be”, he said.
However, Sánchez warned that these evils are not exclusive to Spain. “They are part of a global reactionary movement that aspires to impose its regressive agenda through defamation and falsehood, hatred and appeals to fears and threats that do not correspond to science or rationality”, explained. And he concluded: “Let’s show the world how democracy is defended. Let’s put an end to this mud in the only possible way: through collective, peaceful, democratic rejection, beyond acronyms and ideologies, which I undertake to firmly lead as President of the Government”.
