It already happened to Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba when he led the PSOE. But for years Pedro Sánchez and the current socialist leadership have also been biting their tongues – so as not to throw more fuel on the fire or give ammunition to the right – in the face of Emiliano García-Page’s inveterate habit of marking his own profile and differentiating se of the official line of his party. Especially in the territorial issue, and especially in front of the policy deployed by the Government in Catalonia and the latest negotiations and agreements with the pro-independence parties. Bye now.
The president of Castile-La Mancha and political heir of José Bono, the only socialist autonomous leader who maintains an absolute majority in all of Spain after the elections in May 2023, found, however, an answer to his height after to overflow the patience of the PSOE leadership. This time there was already a public response to Page’s criticisms. And very hard.
The Mancheque president took advantage of his attendance at the Madrid Tourism Fair to express a forceful criticism against the amendment to the Amnesty law agreed the day before between the PSOE, Junts and Esquerra. “There is no good terrorism and bad terrorism,” warned Page. “Terrorism is terrorism, and it means having the intention to generate terror”, he remarked. In the pro-independence protests in Catalonia, he assured, “many organized people wanted to generate social terror”.
The immediate response came from the secretary of organization of the PSOE, Santos Cerdán: “All terrorism is bad”. “The problem raised by others is: what is terrorism? I think the vast majority know it and you should know it”, replied Cerdán to Page. This time, the PSOE leadership did not want to ignore his criticism. Nor bite your tongue.
What’s more, Ferraz was warned that this time Page had met “the toughest” of his leaders, Minister Óscar Puente, already reinstated in the leadership of the PSOE. The Mancheque president also denounced that, in his opinion, the PSOE is currently “outside the Constitution, about to step on the constitutional border”, in the face of the repeated demands of Carles Puigdemont and the pro-independence groups.
And here Page already bumped into Puente, who doesn’t usually have contemplations and directed a hard frontal bet. “Who has been on the sidelines of the PSOE has been Page for quite some time, we are at the center of the Constitution”, replied Puente.
Page looked after modulating his criticism of the party: “The problem is Puigdemont, it’s not the PSOE. Puigdemont wants the PSOE to leave its place and take us to the border, to the extraradius”, he clarified, since according to him the former president is not only looking for amnesty but “impunity”.
But Page did not cower in front of Puente, and once again wielded his absolute majority in Castilla-La Mancha, in a veiled allusion that the minister lost the mayorship of Valladolid after the last municipal elections. Despite the fact that Puente’s list was the most voted for in these elections, the alliance of the PP with the extreme right of Vox snatched the mayorship from him.
“My whole life has been spent winning the right in the elections,” claimed Page. “I would like others to do the same: win the PP. Whoever wins the right and the extreme right is not in any extra-radius. I win the elections, let’s see if I have to apologize to win the elections”, he concluded.
The leadership of the PSOE assure that they have no intention of applying disciplinary measures against Page, despite the fact that they feel fed up with his constant criticism of the party’s official line, revalidated this weekend at a political convention held in A Coruña to which the socialist leader of Castilla-La Mancha also did not attend. It is already customary for Page not to go to Sánchez’s calls, or to the meetings of the PSOE’s federal committee, but this time he excused his presence because he had a scheduled trip to China. “He’s starting to get tired”, they recognize Ferraz.
This public shock to the PSOE in any case dynamited the Government’s strategy to justify the latest amendments to the amnesty negotiated with the pro-independence parties. “Let’s be serious”, demanded the Minister of the Presidency and Justice, Félix Bolaños, before the intense political and legal debate that arose. “Does anyone really think that the pro-independence process is comparable to the terrorism that Spain suffered for decades?”, he said. “What we all understand by terrorism, what Spain suffered during decades of terrorism, is outside the amnesty”, said Bolaños.
