The leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo (right), congratulates the incumbent Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez at the end of the second day of the investiture debate this Thursday in the House of Representatives. JAVIER LIZÓN (EFE)
It wasn’t an anecdote. The first exchange between Alberto Núñez Feijóo, now leader of the opposition, and Pedro Sánchez, recently elected by Parliament as president of the government, was not limited to the usual institutional greeting from loser to winner. As Feijóo approached to shake Sánchez’s hand, as soon as the vote for the socialist candidate was successful, he made serious accusations against him. “This is a mistake,” he told him, looking him in the eyes as he talked about his investiture. Sánchez smiled without letting go of her hand as a cloud of photographers eagerly captured the scene.
Feijóo’s sentence is a statement of intent. Although he assumed during the debate that the socialist president was elected with a “legitimate parliamentary majority,” the PP leader does not believe he will start a normal legislative period. Feijóo attaches the utmost seriousness to the agreements with the pro-independence parties on which the next government will be based and therefore enters the new phase with “democratic alert,” as he said as soon as he left the chamber. The PP leader is preparing for a stubborn opposition that excludes the possibility of state pacts with the progressive coalition.
Feijóo finally completed a cycle this Thursday. The one that opened in Seville a year and seven months ago, when he suddenly took over the leadership of the PP after the defenestration of Pablo Casado. In April 2022, he ascended the PP throne demanded by the barons in order to avoid the party’s shipwreck, but he soon corrected the ship’s course and raised expectations for the government. After the regional and local elections last May, in which the People’s Party wrested territorial power from the Socialists, the goal was obvious. But Sánchez, a courageous politician, the complete opposite of Feijóo, a conservative in the broadest sense of the word, tried and won.
On the night of July 23, one of the worst days of Feijóo’s political life, the socialist leader managed to avoid an absolute majority from PP and Vox that would have put the Galician politician straight into La Moncloa. After the coup, the leader of the PP did not throw in the towel and forced an inauguration before that of the PSOE to try to bring an impossible combination of Vox and the PNV to power. Til today.
That the PP did everything to make Feijóo’s failed inauguration a success was made clear by Thursday’s clash with the PNV in Congress. “One day I will tell you what they offered us a few months ago,” Peneuvista spokesman Aitor Esteban said enigmatically from the lectern early this morning. Shortly afterwards, El Diario Vasco published that the Popular Party had offered the Basque party entry into the government by occupying the Ministry of Industry.
The PP denies this information, which, however, fits into the advertising by land, sea and air that Feijóo launched on the PNV in September. Following their failed dialogue and with elections in Euskadi looming in the coming months, the relationship between the two parties is now extremely hostile. “Alberto,” Aitor Esteban said to Feijóo this Thursday, using his well-known name. “Your tractor engine is blocked due to the use of Vox oil.”
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After the vote that made Sánchez president by 179 votes, Feijóo did not give the PSOE leader a second’s peace. As soon as he left the hall, he baptized him as “a president who was intervened by the independence movement.” So began their relentless resistance.
The leader of the PP expressed “concern” about the situation in which Sánchez will govern, “subject to a monthly contract that the independence movement must sign.” “I honestly believe that the fact that next Wednesday the European Parliament will debate the basis of this investiture, which is an amnesty law for independence, is the worst way to start a legislative period. “It affects our international reputation and undoubtedly our democracy.” In reality, it was the PP that forced this amnesty debate in the European Parliament, because the population will also oppose the government from Brussels.
The atmosphere with which the legislative period between PP and PSOE begins could not be more tense. During the investiture vote, the People’s Party of Parliament pointed this out on its social network account #EverythingForTheChair. Today he abandons his principles and agrees to the investiture of Pedro Sánchez in exchange for amnesty.” Sources from Feijóo’s team later defended this initiative as “an exercise in memory.” During the debate, the President of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, was caught by Congress cameras calling Sánchez a “son of a bitch” when he mentioned his internal war with Pablo Casado. The Madrid head of state did not withdraw these words.
The popular parties are being put under pressure by Vox to radicalize the opposition to the PSOE. Some politicians are concerned about the increasingly anti-systemic tendencies of the far right. “If the PP flirted with this, the fuse could be lit for a social outburst,” these voices admitted during the debate, where Vox ended up not being present to protest in front of the PSOE headquarters. Previously, Santiago Abascal had threatened the PP from the podium to dissolve its autonomous governments if the PP negotiated the amnesty law in the Senate, where it has an absolute majority. The Populars assure that they will pay no attention to the ultras and will work on the law, although they have reformed the regulations to delay it.
With the right on the rise, the PP leadership recognizes that the bridges with the PSOE have been broken. “I don’t want to do it for the good of Spain, but it is not the PP that said that there is a wall that divides Spain in two… That’s what the president said,” defended the deputy secretary of the PP, Esteban González . Pons, in the congress halls. Nobody in the PP doubts that this will not be a legislative period of state pacts. In their parliamentary duel, Feijóo Sánchez even indicated that he would not be available to agree on a common approach between the two major parties if the independents returned to the unilateral path. “If the independence movement fails you,” he warned the new president, “don’t look for me.”
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