The slope is very steep but, after completing with Junts its round of contacts with all the parliamentary groups except Vox, and despite not yet having secured the support that guarantees his re-election, Pedro Sánchez still feels strong enough to reach the goal. “Faced with the complexity of the negotiations we have underway, I guarantee that I trust that there will be a progressive government,” the leader of the PSOE stated yesterday before the militants and leaders of the party in Extremadura, gathered at a rally held in Mérida.
Without giving in, despite the insistence of former president Carles Puigdemont on keeping the unilateral path alive. “We are going to work so that there is a progressive government, that makes progressive policies and that is committed to coexistence, always within the framework of the Constitution,” reaffirmed the leader of the PSOE.
“I have the same desire, if not more, than the first day for there to be a progressive government again,” said Sánchez, to great applause. “I have more desire, more strength and more enthusiasm than the first day I had the honor of being elected President of the Government,” he remarked.
Before 1,500 supporters, Sánchez continued to stage the majority support of the Socialists for the ongoing negotiations to achieve his investiture.
Yesterday, the support of another federation totally refractory to the Catalan or Basque independence movement, such as the PSOE of Extremadura, led by Guillermo Fernández Vara, was made explicit, as Sánchez previously garnered, in his rallies in Granada, Seville and Málaga, among the Andalusian socialists.
Sánchez, together with Vara and the socialist mayor of Mérida, Antonio Rodríguez Osuna, stood up to the rain of insults that once again rained down on the President of the Government at the celebration of the national holiday in Madrid on October 12. “The more they insult, the smaller they become,” replied the PSOE leader.
And he reproached the right for “the insult, the noise and the disqualifications.” They are the result, in his opinion, of frustration because citizens blocked the way at the polls on 23-J to a PP government with the far-right Vox.
“They lost, and they know it,” Sánchez warned. “But worse than losing the elections is being lost,” he blamed Alberto Núñez Feijóo, whom he already reproached in their meeting last Monday for “heating up the street” before 12-O, “as it happened.”
Spain is not breaking up, the PSOE leader insisted, but it is the right that, he stressed, broke in two between the PP and Vox. “Since then, they have entered into a competition to see who shouts the loudest and loudest, to see who calls it the loudest, to see who paints a much darker future for our country,” he lamented. But he insisted on demanding, at least from the PP, “calm, common sense and respect.”
The acting President of the Government also took advantage of his intervention to establish a forceful position against Hamas attacks in Israel. But highlighting, at the same time, that the Jewish State must comply with international humanitarian law in the Gaza Strip.
Spain, he stressed, is “a lover of peace.” “That is why we strongly, and without any ambiguity, condemn the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel, and also the deaths of Israelis,” she stated. “And we demand the urgent release of all Israeli hostages and captives,” she claimed.
“With the same forcefulness,” he warned, Sánchez defended that “of course Israel has the right to defend itself, but always within international humanitarian law, which does not materially endorse the evacuation of Palestinians from Gaza, as the United Nations says.”
The acting president insisted that this entrenched conflict, “which generates so much suffering, anxiety and instability” in the region and throughout the world, can only be resolved when, as the UN itself endorses, “the two states, Israel, are recognized. and Palestine, so that they can coexist in peace and security.” The UN and the Cortes Generales in Spain, because the PSOE recalled that Congress already approved in November 2014, with the unanimous support of all groups, a non-law proposal that urged the Government, at that time that of Mariano Rajoy, to recognize Palestine as a state.
