“Everything will be known”, assured Carles Puigdemont about the talks this summer between the Popular Party and Junts per Catalunya to try to get Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s investiture, which ultimately failed, on track.
And the PSOE attribute to this warning from the former president of the Generalitat what they consider a blatant turn of the script in Feijóo’s speech, a shot in their own foot already in the final stretch of the Galician campaign. Because they emphasize that the leader of the PP opened the door to the pardon for Puigdemont, questioned that the judicial investigation can prove his involvement in terrorist acts, and even admitted that for 24 hours he considered an amnesty for those accused of the process And all this framed in a “reconciliation plan” with Catalonia. In other words, an amendment to all the elements on which Feijóo’s fierce opposition strategy to Pedro Sánchez pivots.
The Central Government and the leadership of the PSOE jumped together yesterday to denounce “the big lie” they attribute to a Feijóo who they see cornered by Puigdemont, after months of suffering from his criticism that the socialists are surrendered at his feet. Sánchez himself insisted, in an interview with La Voz de Galicia, on what he has been repeating for some time: “If Feijóo did not depend on Vox, he would have approved the amnesty”.
An avalanche of ministers and socialist leaders denounced this “big lie” by Feijóo. The first to try to escape was the Minister of the Presidency and Justice, Félix Bolaños. “The PP and Feijóo tell us that their apocalyptic opposition to amnesty is just an interpretation, that they know there was no terrorism and they want reconciliation and pardons”, he stressed. “Will they apologize for the barbarities they have told us?”, he claimed.
Bolaños himself, on Friday, already criticized the “double standard” of Feijóo. “If Junts had supported the investiture of Feijóo, and he had been president, today the PP would be defending an Amnesty law”. And he urged the leader of the PP to speak: “What did Feijóo offer Junts in the negotiations he had with them during the summer, and what did he offer them specifically in relation to their legal cases?”.
In Moncloa and Ferraz remember that Feijóo has been calling demonstrations for months, and encouraging ultra rallies in front of the PSOE headquarters, “full of insults” to the Spanish Government, first for the pardons and now for the amnesty. “The PP only knows how to move in mud and lies and, after so many attacks and reproaches, the truth is coming to light”, denounced in turn the spokeswoman for the Spanish Executive, Pilar Alegría. “Feijóo weighed the amnesty and now proposes a pardon for Puigdemont”, he pointed out. “At this stage, next week he will demonstrate against himself”, said Alegría ironically about the leader of the PP.
“The shamelessness of Feijóo’s PP has no limits”, said the first vice-president of the Spanish Government and deputy general secretary of the PSOE, María Jesús Montero. “He said he’s not president because he didn’t want to and hid from the Spanish that he was ready to grant pardons,” added Montero.
And ex-president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, yesterday at a meeting in Ferrol, pointed in the same direction, since he considers that the new positions attributed to Feijóo represent “the end of a great infamy that we have lived through these three months starring by the right and the PP of Feijóo, generating tension, attacking the Spanish Government, saying that Spain, the Constitution, the Rule of Law are being broken, and it turns out that everything was a big hypocrisy, a big lie!”, he cried.
Zapatero emphasized, in view of the discursive turn he attributed to the PP, that “in a few days Puigdemont has ceased to be a terrorist, he must be granted a pardon for reconciliation and amnesty was negotiable”. “In a few weeks they will propose the beatification of Puigdemont!”, he quipped.
And even the president of Castile-La Mancha, the socialist Emiliano García-Page, added to the avalanche of criticism: “That the PP negotiated with the Penal Code to get an investiture or any political income seems inexplicable to me and indefensible”.
