Feijóo: "In order not to attend the debate, I was the most cited person"

Alberto Núñez Feijóo saw almost the entire debate held yesterday on TVE between Pedro Sánchez, Yolanda Díaz and Santiago Abascal.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
19 July 2023 Wednesday 16:21
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Feijóo: "In order not to attend the debate, I was the most cited person"

Alberto Núñez Feijóo saw almost the entire debate held yesterday on TVE between Pedro Sánchez, Yolanda Díaz and Santiago Abascal. He was already in Valencia, where today he will resume his electoral agenda, despite the low back pain that has afflicted him since Tuesday, and he draws a conclusion: "In order not to attend, I must be the most cited person."

What he saw was "three candidates to lead the opposition", three parties with the same objective "that whoever wins the elections cannot govern", and he includes Abascal among them. And it is that in the opinion of the president of the PP, there are too many occasions, if Vox wanted to be an ally of the PP, which he doubts, that those of Abascal vote together with the PSOE, so that the PP does not govern.

He has already seen it in two autonomous communities, Murcia, where there is still no president because both Vox and the PSOE voted against the PP candidate, who won the elections, and in Cantabria, where the PP candidate was sworn in, not thanks to Vox, but to Miguel Ángel Revilla's party. That same thing, Feijóo emphasizes, has occurred in six mayors.

Faced with this situation, the president of the PP reiterates his offer to Pedro Sánchez, during the face-to-face debate held ten days ago, that the president be the one who wins the elections, and the other party facilitate this investiture. Afterwards, it will be governed by seeking parliamentary support. He is ready because he wants to overcome the bloc policy that has governed Spanish politics in recent years.

But he is convinced that Sánchez will not accept it because "the PSOE has no problem with Vox being in government, what it does not want is for the PP to govern," he said in an interview on RNE's Las Mañanas. And there is another of the reasons why the popular leader did not accept the four-person debate held yesterday on RTVE, and he has not accepted, not because he is worried about having a photo with Abascal, but because the current Prime Minister does not have one with Otegi and Junqueras, with whom he will have to agree if he wants to govern. For Feijóo, "seeing the president debating with the vice president, without the rest of the partners, even if they are parliamentarians, is not reasonable."

Alberto Núñez Feijóo bases this approach on issues such as the latest proposal made, at the same time, by Bildu and ERC, to hold a referendum on self-determination in the next legislature, on the same day, in the Basque Country and in Catalonia, to which in his opinion Pedro Sánchez would have something to say if he is going to have these parties as partners. "That is the price to which the independentistas submit the possible investiture of Sánchez," he warned during the rally that he held in Valencia "

He is clear about what his policies will be: to recover the crime of sedition, increase the penalties for embezzlement and classify the calling of an illegal referendum as a crime. That is to say, Feijóo stressed in RNE: "The same thing that Sánchez said before being president and that he failed to comply with, I say it and it will be seen that I am going to comply."

This although his policy for Catalonia ensures that it is that of dialogue, contrary to what Abascal says, who prefers tension. The president of the PP insisted that "what has to be done in Catalonia is to reduce the tension, which has already been enough these years, and talk to everyone, even with people who don't like the Constitution. He wants to "talk to Catalonia about the problems of the Catalans."

The president of the PP considers that it is good, to regulate electoral debates by law, and considers that this regulation should contemplate a face-to-face between the candidates who have more options to govern, and then there may be others depending on the parliamentary arc, and he hopes that this will be done, and that they can be held on RTVE, as he hopes that there will be a "management more consensual than the one that exists", which was agreed between PSOE and PP, then the general director was forced to resign, and now he finds himself, he stressed, in an "allegal" situation.

Feijóo continued this Thursday with the rallies, in the morning in Valencia and in the afternoon in Madrid, before closing tomorrow in Malaga and A Coruña. Despite his low back pain, which makes him walk with difficulty, and he was able to see in Valencia the work that it cost him to sit down, the president of the PP is making efforts to "beat the polls" and achieve a government alone, "that can govern from day one, lower taxes and present budgets for next year."

To do this, the popular leader asks the PP for a useful vote, that of all those who "want change", because in his project, he said, "there is room for many socialists, those who are not sanchistas", as well as "those who voted for a new policy and have realized that it was a good policy". He asks for the vote "to those who were going to touch the sky", to those of 15-M who "got Sánchez to be president and now they find that his colleagues have thrown them out."

In the final stretch of the campaign, the PP has hit again with its advertising to highlight "Sánchez's lies". This Thursday, the PP has inserted advertising in several national newspapers, in which under the title "A president of lies" and a photo of Pedro Sánchez at the door of La Moncloa, it lists 10 "lies" of the still president: "he promised that he would not agree with Podemos", "he promised that he would not agree with Bildu", "He defended the law of only yes is yes when they already reduced sentences for violators", "he promised that he would reform the Penal Code to include the call for illegal referendums", "he asserted that there would never again be pardons for political reasons", during the pandemic "he justified health decisions" based on "the criteria of a committee of experts that did not exist", "he demanded the independence of the prosecution, but when he arrived at the Government he put it at the service of the PSOE", "they assured that the humanitarian crisis in Melilla, where 23 people died, was not a Spanish problem and that it had not happened in our sovereign territory", "he affirmed that José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero He did not freeze pensions and that was what he did in 2011, with his favorable vote", "he said he would not raise taxes and it is the government that has raised the most taxes, more than 40 times".