"Step on some glass." President Pedro Sánchez saved his best sentence for the last minute, after two long hours of debate with Alberto Núñez Feijóo in the Senate. “Some Crystal” is a statement on economic policy that, beyond accusations of government ineffectiveness, expressed —this time yes— with conviction and without errors, draws its own doctrine to deal with successive collapsing crises —pandemic, war, climate change. ..— apart from the new Keynesian-inspired European consensus that Sánchez applies with the blessings of Brussels.
The gesture of leaving the president of the Senate, Ánder Gil, a bundle of pages with the "proposals" that the president insistently demanded, was not lacking in cunning, but a good gesture and the bulk of some documents do not fill the absence of a speech . However, this time Feijóo fought with aplomb and the generosity with which Gil managed his time allowed him to warm up and give television cuts of great vigor.
The popular leader, who was applauded by his fellow party members with an intensity rarely seen in the yawning chamber, had to go home happy. Parliamentary fencing does not always require content and appreciates the agility in the verb and the intensity in the movements. Clinging to a glass of water with which he tried to mitigate the patent dryness of the mouth that accompanied him all afternoon -which made the importance of the hour transparent-, Feijóo spoke quickly and chained resounding accounting arguments against the Government of Sánchez, according to the catechism neoliberal in force during the last decades: deficit, debt, spending...
The music was a vibrant attack on the brass but the choir played old lyrics from bookkeeper bureaucracy. Because the neoliberal orthodoxy, a living dead for the last five years, today is a mummy whose curse threatens to take away the government of Liz Truss. The British prime minister may be forced to leave 10 Downing Street less than forty days after her appointment for having said what her conservative and liberal co-religionists have been saying throughout Europe for forty years. A financial crisis, a pandemic, a war and a frightening climate have made that word revealed, a dead letter on yellow leaves, a treasure of economic archaeology.
That was the substance of the debate and that is why the president, again armed with the endless catalog of anti-crisis measures that he has been deploying for three years and that the European Union has been sanctioning as new consensuses, was so confident. So much so that the growing comfort of the leader of the opposition and his assistant the glass of water, came to put him in some trouble during the second aftershock. The popular senators stood up in bullfighting ways.
Sánchez recovered in his brief closing speech and came up with the phrase: "Step on some glass." But there was a good reason for Feijóo not to do it, besides honoring that elusive Atlantic asset called “Galicianness”, if such a thing existed. And that reason, the Liz Truss damage, will still be there next month and next year. Apart from the prosaic domestic political issues that will occupy us in the coming weeks, as passionate and inconsequential as the soccer league, that is the underlying question that the conservative candidate must solve. If there is a recipe, a replacement doctrine for Milton Friedman's book of psalms, now that history is abyssing, or if he intends to launch his assault on the presidency of the Government armed with the routine accountant's sleeves.
