Alberto Núñez Feijóo turns the investiture debate into a motion of censure against the candidate who has not yet been appointed. Pedro Sánchez responds by sending to the speakers' gallery a central defender from Valladolid, yesterday mayor of the city, today, an ordinary deputy. The candidate entered the chamber with the question of Catalonia as a figurehead, and the acting president of the Government ignored him, delegating to a candidate for mayor who was the most voted in his city in the last municipal elections and could not be re-elected a pact between the Popular Party and Vox.
Puente distributed firewood. That was the assignment. Discomfited, Feijóo felt cosmic anger. From here on, the debate was derailed. At times, the president of Congress, Francina Armengol, had difficulty directing the debate. The relationship between the Popular Party and the PSOE is at the lowest point in recent years.
First word: amnesty. Second word: self-determination. The candidate wanted to start with a bang. As soon as he began, he simulated acceptance of the demands of Junts per Catalunya and Esquerra Republicana, and immediately added: “I am not going to defend this.”
The candidate launched a motion of no confidence in the candidate who has not yet been named. For the first time since 1977, the investiture debate became something else. And Sánchez, in the afternoon, contributed to this with his deliberate silence.
In the Catalan opening there were also heavy-handed messages. The candidate announced the inclusion in the Penal Code of a new crime of “constitutional disloyalty”, whose content and delimitation he did not explain. He also proposed toughening the penalties for the crime of embezzlement. He said nothing about the restoration of the old crime of sedition.
“If I had wanted, I would have the votes for the investiture,” said Núñez Feijóo. That is one of the main frames of his speech this week. If the popular candidate for the presidency of the government had made the slightest concession to the Catalan sovereigntists and Basque nationalism, he would have automatically lost the support of the 33 Vox deputies and would probably have had a fire within his party, that fire which radio player Federico Jiménez Losantos claims when he states in his morning harangues that “you have to enter Genoa with a flamethrower.”
Vox is today the elephant in the room of the Spanish conventional right. You can do nothing without them. With Vox, the Popular Party does not have an absolute majority, and without Vox, it is 38 deputies short of that majority. With Vox he has committed to governing, in coalition or through parliamentary support, in the Valencian Community, Aragon, the Balearic Islands, Cantabria, Murcia and Extremadura, as well as in dozens of city councils. With Vox, he has embarked on a European-wide operation to facilitate greater rapprochement of the European People's Party (EPP) with various far-right parties loyal to the Atlantic Alliance, a strategy that Manfred Weber, president of the EPP, is currently reviewing. , precisely in view of the recent electoral results in Spain.
In the afternoon, the candidate tried to be nice to Vox, which in his initial speech he had gently described as a “unitary party.” Santiago Abascal was also kind to him. The message that the far-right party wanted to send to the entire conservative electorate is the following: unconditional support at a time of national emergency. It's a smart choice. Vox is now exploring new territories. Under the guidance of Jorge Buxadé, it has just launched a campaign against a major supermarket chain that in its advertising supports the 2030 agenda, adopted by the UN in 2015.
After the first part of his speech, dedicated to galvanizing his electorate (8.1 million citizens) and avoiding any doubt about his rejection of any form of commitment to the independence movement, Feijóo detailed his government proposals, with a certain profusion of social democratic goldsmithing. The candidate promises to lower the personal income tax, reduce the VAT on main foods, but also wants to raise the SMI to 60% of the average salary, make working hours more flexible, improve the coverage of the minimum vital tax and maintain the current aid to face inflation and the increase in fuel prices. The leader of the PP wants less taxes, wants to maintain, and even expand, the social democratic social shield, and at the same time wants to comply with the fiscal rules of the European Union, in the review phase. In Brussels they will have listened carefully.
Feijóo addresses the left-wing electorate by telling them that it will not harm them materially. No word about pensions that could trigger alarm. He also addresses the material interests of the voters of the Basque Nationalist Party and Junts per Catalunya with the following question: “Have they voted for them to apply Podemos's economic policy?” Priority for material interests. It is an almost Marxist approach. It is an enveloping maneuver.
Strategy that we could define as the Anti-Japanese United Front, borrowing an expression that José Rodríguez de la Borbolla, former president of the Junta de Andalucía, used a few years ago. An admirer of Chinese history, Rodríguez de la Borbolla defended a few years ago a united front against the Catalan independence movement that would emulate the anti-Japanese front that was formed in China in 1937 with a provisional alliance of the Chinese Communist Party with the Kuomitang nationalists. First they fought the common enemy together and then they fought each other. Mao Zedong's party won.
In the proposal of the former Andalusian president, the Japanese were the Catalan secessionists. In Feijóo's strategy, the Japanese is Sánchez.
Yolanda Díaz did not speak either. The new spokesperson, Marta Lois, from Galicia, spoke first for Sumar. Mild manners, professorial speech. The language of Podemos, excluded from Sumar's spokespersons, was not present in Congress yesterday for the first time in eight years. Óscar Puente's tones were the most purple yesterday. Feijóo has pending accounts with Yolanda Díaz, pending accounts that come from Galicia, and yesterday it became clear.
The speed of the debate after Puente's appearance on the platform allowed ERC and Junts to take the floor, expressing themselves almost entirely in Catalan. Gabriel Rufián, who in his second intervention spoke in Spanish, defended the amnesty and vindicated the role of his party in the negotiated path. Míriam Nogueras spoke of “historical commitment”, demanded a referendum in Catalonia appealing to article 92 of the Constitution and said that “everything has changed” with the entry on the scene of Junts.
Feijóo's reply: “They have spoken clearly. After listening to his interventions, it is clear why Sánchez did not want to speak. Either you lie or Sánchez lies.”
"Is there nothing left of Convergence and Union?", he asked.
Núñez Feijóo demonstrated that he is an effective parliamentary speaker. He controls the data well, is incisive, dangerous in his responses and plays masterfully with half-truths. He wanted to attack Sánchez and he ignored him. The day began with the amnesty and concluded by talking about Óscar Puente.
Normality in the use of languages. Nobody will take it back.
