New course, same political clash. The amnesty that has monopolized the public debate since the investiture of Pedro Sánchez was put on track yesterday won on the street against the emerging tractor units of rural protests, in the political struggle waged in the first session of the year of control of the Government in Congress, due to the intense offensive deployed by the right.
Sánchez entered the chamber calm and smiling, offering a very different image from the last time he left it, tense and very angry, after Junts voted against the drafting of the Amnesty law, in the plenary session on Tuesday of the week. passed, and thus stop its processing.
The president did not lose his smile, and responded with irony to Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s first attack, drawing applause and laughter from the PSOE bench, despite the fact that the gorge through which the legislature runs becomes dangerously narrow, with doubts about a agreement with Junts to unblock the amnesty, the unknowns of a reform of the Criminal Procedure law that is very difficult to balance, and the uncertainty surrounding the first general budgets of the mandate. And while columns of tractors cut roads throughout the country, until Barcelona collapsed, in a new day of rural mobilizations.
Feijóo (PP), Santiago Abascal (Vox) and also Teresa Jordà (ERC) criticized Sánchez for the demands of the primary sector, in response to which the president announced a strengthening of the food chain law to try to avoid sales to farmers’ losses.
But the session showed that the right maintains the amnesty unbeatable, and the concessions to the Catalan independence movement to keep the legislature afloat, as the main battering ram of the political confrontation against the Government.
Feijóo asked Sánchez his first question, addressing the JxCat deputies: “I know perfectly well who is in charge in this Chamber.” And, already looking at the leader of the PSOE, he added: “Now everyone knows that without Puigdemont you are nobody.” “Now he no longer laughs like he laughed in the fall,” he highlighted.
But Sánchez, who did not doubt where Feijóo would attack him, had prepared a script that ironically took advantage of a mistake by the PP leader, made during his electoral campaign in rural Galicia, when he confused the methane emitted by cows with methanol, a chemical compound that the socialist leader equated with the “solvent” strategy that he attributed to him. “Stop using methanol to oppose,” he asked him.
“The three properties of methanol are: colorless, like its political project for Spain; flammable, like his desire for hyperbole and insult; and toxic, like his economic catastrophism and his desire to poison democratic coexistence,” Sánchez replied to Feijóo, to applause from the government bench.
And he insisted on this side, highlighting that methanol is also used as fuel, which also reproached the leader of the PP for his attacks on the negotiations and agreements with the independence movement. “Fuel is what they are trying to use in Catalonia to fan a fire that was happily overcome, which was the crisis of 2017,” he denounced.
Sánchez vindicated his management, also for breaking records in economic growth and job creation: “The reality is that the Spanish economy is going like a motorcycle.” And he accused the PP: “Either you understand the political pluralism and territorial diversity of Spain, or you don’t understand Spain, which is what happens to you.”
The reality that Sánchez defended is very different from that drawn by Feijóo, who dwelled on the Government’s difficulties in approving initiatives that are even overturned “by its partners”, and “with no budgets in sight.” “Any European government would fall because of this, I assure you that you will fall too. He has spent six months dedicated body and soul to a single issue: amnesty,” he stressed. And he urged him to understand that “four years like this are unsustainable, there is no one who can stand it, not even you, an expert in the decomposition of the Government.”
“While he lives obsessed with the news that comes to him from Waterloo, the real Spain feels neglected,” Feijóo reproached. “Spanish people without criminal records also require the attention of the Government,” he warned. And after criticizing him for being “too focused on changing the criteria of the Prosecutor’s Office,” he prescribed Sánchez to govern “for those who pay his salary, and not for those who have put him in Moncloa.”
The session continued with up to six questions and an urgent question, from the PP and Vox, to Minister Félix Bolaños. All about the amnesty, by Cuca Gamarra, Miguel Tellado, Rafael Hernando, Elías Bendodo, Sergio Sayas, Pepa Millán and Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo. “The complete ultra alignment,” observed the minister.
