New school year, same political shock. The amnesty, which has monopolized the public debate since Pedro Sánchez’s investiture was put on track, won by a large margin yesterday the emerging tractors of the countryside protest in the political struggle started in the first session of the year of control to the Government in Congress, due to the intense offensive launched by the right.
Sánchez entered the chamber calm and smiling, and offered a very different image from the last time he left it, tense and very angry, after Junts voted against the text of the Amnesty law, in full Tuesday of last week, and slowed down the processing.
The president did not lose his smile, he responded with irony to Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s first attack and drew applause and laughter from the PSOE group, even though the gorge through which the legislature passes is narrowing dangerously, with the doubts on an agreement with Junts to unblock the amnesty, the unknowns of a reform of the Criminal Procedure law which is very difficult to balance and the uncertainty surrounding the first general budgets of the mandate. And meanwhile columns of tractors cut roads all over the country, until Barcelona collapsed, in another day of rural mobilizations.
Feijóo (PP), Santiago Abascal (Vox) and also Teresa Jordà (ERC) criticized Sánchez for the demands of the primary sector, before which the president announced a strengthening of the Food Chain law to try to avoid sales to losses of farmers. But the session showed that the right maintains unbeatable amnesty, and concessions to Catalan independence to keep the legislature afloat, as the main battering ram of the political confrontation against the Spanish Government.
Feijóo threw the first question at Sánchez, addressing the Junts deputies: “I know perfectly well who is in charge in this House.” And, already looking at the leader of the PSOE, he said: “Now everyone knows that you are nobody without Carles Puigdemont”. “Now I no longer laugh like I used to laugh in the autumn”, he emphasized.
But Sánchez, who did not doubt from where Feijóo would attack him, had prepared a script that ironically took advantage of a slip of the PP leader, committed in the electoral campaign for rural Galicia, after confusing the methane emitted by cows with methanol, a chemical compound that the socialist leader equated with the “solvent” strategy he attributed to him. “Stop using methanol to oppose”, he asked.
“The three properties of methanol are colorless, like his political project for Spain; flammable, like his eagerness for hyperbole and insult, and toxic, like his economic catastrophism and his eagerness to poison democratic coexistence”, replied Sánchez to Feijóo, amid applause from the government group. And he insisted on this side, after emphasizing that methanol is also used as fuel, a fact that also reprimanded the leader of the PP in the face of his attacks on negotiations and agreements with independence. “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 goes like a motorbike”. 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 is happening to you.”
The reality that Sánchez defended is very different from the one drawn by Feijóo, who recreated the central government’s difficulties in approving initiatives that even “its partners” vote against, and “with no budgets in sight “. “Any European government would fall because of this, I assure you that you will too. For six months he has dedicated himself body and soul to a single issue: amnesty”, he stressed. And he called on him to understand that “four years like this are unsustainable, no one can endure them, not even you, an expert in the breakdown of the Executive”.
“While he lives obsessed with the news that reaches him of Waterloo, real Spain feels neglected”, criticized Feijóo. “Spaniards without criminal records also require the attention of the Executive”, he warned. And after criticizing him for being “too focused on changing the criteria of the Prosecutor’s Office”, he instructed Sánchez to govern “for those who pay him his salary, and not for those who put him in Moncloa”.
The session continued with six questions and an urgent interpellation, from the PP and Vox, to Minister Félix Bolaños. All about amnesty, by Cuca Gamarra, Miguel Tellado, Rafael Hernando, Elías Bendodo, Sergio Sayas, Pepa Millán and Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo. “The ultra alignment completely”, observed the minister.
