The rupture is complete. Once the last opportunity they were granted to agree on the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary was blown up the day before, after almost four years of unsuccessful attempts, Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo fired their political hostilities yesterday, entrenching themselves in their respective positions to rearm before the definitive electoral battle and they even denied each other as future interlocutors.
The European Commission, in the midst of a terrifying global crisis due to the war unleashed in Ukraine, observes in astonishment the new clash between the President of the Government and the leader of the Popular Party, which keeps open the channel of the greatest institutional and constitutional wound of democracy in Spain, which in just over half a year will assume the rotating presidency of the European Union. The judicial top of the country remains headless, after a resignation of Carlos Lesmes that pushed Sánchez and Feijóo precisely to try a last option of agreement, a little more than fifteen days ago. Once this path is closed, no solution is in sight.
Sánchez landed early yesterday morning at Moncloa, after his long return trip from South Africa, showing consternation, disappointment, anger and absolute distrust towards Feijóo, since in his opinion the PP leader crossed a red line that it had to be impassable, by leaking a conversation that it considered private to justify the unilateral breakdown of the negotiations. The conclusion expressed by the President of the Government was very descriptive: “Feijóo's legs have trembled”.
The leader of the main opposition party, according to Sánchez, would thus have succumbed to the enormous pressure of the most ultramontane and reactionary right and its media terminals, in addition to the economic powers before which he assures that he is folded. With his decision to break off the negotiations, Sánchez warns that this more extreme right would not have doubled his pulse, but Feijóo's own. The leader of the PP, Minister Félix Bolaños abounded yesterday in this sense, "the reactionary elements that are inside and outside his party have doubled his pulse." And for this reason, he affirmed, he ceases to be a "valid interlocutor" for the Government.
The telephone message that the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, sent to Feijóo on Thursday morning, urging him to suspend all negotiations with Sánchez – "It's outrageous" – is proof, for the socialists, of the lack authority of the current president of the PP among his own ranks and the weakness of his leadership.
“But who really commands the PP? Because it is evident that Feijóo does not”, they denounce in Moncloa. “Feijóo does not have autonomy, he is protected, he is a puppet. He bowed to pressure from third parties. Leading implies deciding, not just following orders, and Feijóo has shown that he cannot do it. Leading the opposition is great for him”, settle the socialists.
All this, moreover, when in Moncloa and in the leadership of the PSOE they had been warning in recent weeks that the so-called Feijóo effect, which implied that the leader of the PP would assume the presidency of the Government after the next general elections only driven by the polls and without having to get off the bus, he was rapidly deflating.
The breakdown of the negotiations, in the opinion of the Socialists, also dynamites the image of moderation and pactism with which Feijóo sought to consolidate his alternative, as opposed to the profile of his predecessor at the head of the PP, Pablo Casado. But Feijóo himself, yesterday in Vitoria, insisted on defending the great State pacts. Something that he warned is impossible as long as a Sánchez remains at the head of the PSOE, whom he sees in turn bending to the interests of the Catalan and Basque separatists to stay in Moncloa. “Citizens yearn for agreements and they will come, with this PP and with another PSOE”, he affirmed.
According to Feijóo's argument, the Prime Minister does not want to discuss a reform of the Penal Code with the PP, with regard to the crimes of sedition and rebellion, and prefers to negotiate it, precisely, with those who "broke the law", in reference to to the Republican Left. An "insurmountable inconsistency" of the leader of the PSOE, in his opinion, if he at the same time seeks to improve the independence of the judges with the PP.
Precisely the visit that Feijóo made yesterday to Vitoria – the Basque capital to which Sánchez will travel next weekend, since it is a place in electoral dispute – was the reason that the PP leader alleged for not being able to meet the demand that he transferred the President of the Government to meet in Moncloa as soon as he landed from his trip to South Africa. And since Sánchez will travel to Seville today to commemorate, together with Felipe González, the 40th anniversary of the PSOE's electoral victory in 1982, both agreed to meet again behind the bridge, next Wednesday, November 2, to address the situation.
After the hour of telephone conversation that Sánchez and Feijóo had on Thursday – the president called him taking advantage of a long journey from Johannesburg to Pretoria – and despite the fact that the leader of the PP already told him that there could be no agreement on the renewal of the Judiciary if he chose to lower the penalties for the crime of sedition, the chief executive trusted that there was still "hope" to save the pact.
Everything exploded when, on a stopover on his return trip to Madrid in Luanda, capital of Angola, Sánchez was informed of the statement that the PP issued on Thursday night, which revealed the telephone conversation and announced the suspension of the negotiations, justified because the President of the Government would have confirmed that he was not going to renounce the reform of the crime of sedition.
The judicial agreement with the PP was finalized, according to Sánchez, and the names of the new members of the judiciary had been agreed. Even the substitutes. Only the staging of the agreement with Feijóo was pending. But everything, again, was dynamited again at the last moment.
