From the first moment everything was very clear, precisely from the first word of Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s speech. The leader of the PP stood on the congress platform, arranged his papers, saluted and announced: “Amnesty.” Hours later, already amid the noise of replies and counter-responses, the matter became even more transparent when the deputy of Sumar Enrique Santiago announced a possible amnesty for vigorously defended the defendants in the trial and the presidential candidate. He thanked him with a certain irony: “You have come to clarify what this investiture is about.” And that was indeed the strangest inaugural session that Congress has ever seen . The theoretical candidate for La Moncloa turned it into a motion of no confidence against an incumbent government or a government that has not even been formed and whose eventual president is not even an official candidate.
The agenda stated that the Galician politician arrived there to ask the Chamber for support in his attempt to lead the government, but what he actually did was to demonstrate his role as future opposition leader. The anomaly of the situation was completed by the person attacked: Pedro Sánchez chose to despise Feijóo, did not intervene in the debate and handed over the statement to the deputy Óscar Puente, who inflamed the atmosphere in the room with an incendiary intervention against the leader Red increased the PP. It was the first time a sitting president decided not to attend an inauguration session.
Feijóo mentioned the word amnesty and talked about it for minutes. His first message was to assert that he is not president because he doesn’t want to be. To this end, he constructed a kind of syllogism: if he accepted the amnesty and the referendum, he would have the support of the independents, overlooking the fact that in this case he would lose Vox’s and again find himself without the necessary majority.
Almost 40 minutes had to pass – the speech lasted up to 100 – before he began to announce a government proposal. During this time, he expressed his greatest concerns about the future of Spanish democracy if the clemency measures were eventually approved as part of Sánchez’s pacts with the independence movement. “It would be a direct attack on essential democratic values,” he said. And after assuming that the amnesty was unconstitutional, he declared: “There is no democracy outside the constitution.”
Feijóo repeatedly hit Sánchez. He accused him of “frontism” and “systematic deception.” And in the midst of these violent attacks he tried to place the idea that he was the representative of “unity among the Spaniards”. In this attempt, he even declared himself the successor of Adolfo Suárez, Felipe González, José María Aznar, Mariano Rajoy and, in some aspects, even José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
When it came time to outline a government program, the star measures were also linked to the Catalonia conflict: he announced that he would push forward the classification of a new crime as “unconstitutional.” Otherwise there was little new to what he had already presented in the election campaign. In economics, he once again painted a catastrophic picture of the situation in Spain, spreading data that his opponents described as false and repeating the well-known offer to cut taxes. In addition, he saved his offers of state pacts – up to six – without providing any further information on the content.
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Sánchez attended Feijóo’s speech with an abundance of gestures of joy and even laughter while speaking with incumbent vice presidents Nadia Calviño and Yolanda Díaz. The Socialists have been sowing doubts for days about whether their leader would intervene in the debate. And during the lunch break after the candidate’s speech, it was clear that Sánchez had decided to pass with flying colors. The witness was not even picked up by the group’s spokesman, Patxi López, but by a new deputy, one of the most impetuous: the former mayor of Valladolid Óscar Puente.
Feijóo had begun a litany early in the morning, which he did not utter throughout the day. Whichever speaker stood before him assumed that he was the winner of the election. The election of the socialist speaker was aimed at attacking Feijóo there and highlighting his contradictions, since Puente had received the most votes in the last municipal elections in Valladolid, but the PP stripped him of the mayoralty after agreeing to Vox.
So Puente climbed to the podium with an arsenal of sarcasm to speak “winner to winner” with Feijóo. He first explained to him that the crime of unfaithfulness to the constitution could be applied to him because he blocked the renewal of the judiciary, and finally accused the candidate of collecting bonuses, sowed doubts about the increase in his wealth and invoked his old friendship with him Galician leader Marcial Dorado. . And all of this between enthusiastic ovations from the socialists and protests and kicks from the popular parties. When Feijóo took the stand, he attacked Sánchez for his silence: “He asked me for six debates during the campaign and he didn’t show up for the second one.” The popular squares erupted in a chorus: “Coward! Coward!”.
The popular leader, somewhat confused by Puente’s aggressiveness, showed his most ironic side in the duels with the speakers of Sumar and the Catalan independence fighters. Among other things, because they talked again about what he wanted most: amnesty. The three MPs who intervened on Sumar’s behalf defended it as a tool to pacify Catalan politics. Both Gabriel Rufián from ERC and Míriam Nogueras from Junts stressed that the clemency measures are only a first step and that their final demand is the referendum. Without a consultation on independence, the Esquerra spokesman stressed, “the amnesty would be of little use.” Nogueras accused the PP of its campaigns “against Catalonia” since the time of the Statute of Autonomy and concluded: “We need independence for the linguistic, cultural and economic survival of our nation.” Feijóo firmly rejected their arguments, although he tried not to enter into direct conflict.
The only kind words for the candidate came from the Vox boss. Santiago Abascal and Feijóo made it clear that there are differences, but staged a debate at Versailles in which their new status as partners became clear. Between friendly gestures from both sides, the popular man thanked Abascal “for his patriotism.” He had previously defined Vox as a “unified force” in his first speech. Feijóo included an insinuation that could be interpreted as a call for reunification of the right: “If the entire center-right party had taken part in the elections, we would have 190 representatives.” The wink triggered one of Abascal’s few attacks: “Is Was this calculation made by the same person who told him he would win with a majority?”
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