As José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero suffered, in Moncloa they assume that whenever the PP runs out of arguments or fails in its strategies to destabilize Pedro Sánchez, it resorts to what they call "its classics".
That is to say: “ETA and Catalonia”. The two issues that supply political and electoral oil to the right and to which they denounce that Alberto Núñez Feijóo also clings, "like a straw", to draw a thick veil over his "unilateral rupture" of the agreement to renew the Council General of the Judicial Power.
This decision, which they see forced by the pressure of the hawks on the right, assures in Moncloa that it will have a high cost for the incipient trajectory of the current leader of the PP. In fact, in the Government they see Feijóo facing his first "great leadership crisis", just seven months after the abrupt fall of his predecessor, Pablo Casado.
“Feijóo failed in his fiscal proposal, he failed in his energy proposal and now he has failed in the renewal of the Judiciary. And the polls no longer smile so much. So he turns to ETA and Catalonia again, as always”, they analyze in Moncloa.
The new strategy of the PP was clearly portrayed yesterday in the first control session of the Government in Congress after the rupture of the negotiations of the judicial pact. The general secretary of the popular party, Cuca Gamarra, opened the fire, denouncing Sánchez's "pacts with the independentistas", now before a reform of the crime of sedition with which they justify the rupture of the agreement on the Judicial Power.
The PP leader used the recent statement by Carles Puigdemont, according to which some unspecified socialist emissaries had offered her "happy solutions". Puigdemont knows that in the PP he has an ally to destabilize the central government since Waterloo.
“Who is that new Mr. X from the PSOE who went to see Puigdemont? Who has gone to negotiate the Penal Code tailored to the coup leaders? Who has offered that the laws in Spain be drafted at the headquarters of the Esquerra Republicana?” Gamarra shot at Sánchez. "Whoever it was, he did it on his orders," he said. And he urged the President of the Government to "renounce, here and now, the modification of the crime of sedition to lower the penalties." “Feijóo has a word, political principles and conscience. You are not".
From then on, the PP deputies, in a cascade, searched among the socialist ministers for that mysterious Mr. X. "Were you in charge of negotiating in Waterloo with a fugitive from justice?" Carlos Rojas asked Vice President Nadia Calviño. The same was asked of Vice President Teresa Ribera and Ministers Fernando Grande-Marlaska and Pilar Alegría.
"Enough is enough and comply with the Constitution!" Sánchez replied to the entire PP bench. “They have no arguments,” he warned. And he reproached them for "distributing Spanish identity and constitutionalism cards", when precisely during the mandate of Mariano Rajoy "Spain was close to being able to break", in reference to the unilateral declaration of independence proclaimed in Catalonia in 2017. Sánchez reproached, at time, that the PP has spent four years in the opposition "skipping its obligation to comply with the Constitution", by blocking the renewal of the Judiciary.
Faced with the right-wing offensive against Sánchez's commitment to reform sedition, the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, warned that "everything we do will always be within the law and the Constitution." But he also stressed that "Feijóo's leadership is touched and probably sunk." "He is already a new failed leader of the PP", he sentenced. And he trusted that, after Casado and Feijóo, "the third time will be the charm."
The government spokeswoman, Isabel Rodríguez, summed it up: "The only thing left on the PP's agenda is ETA and Spain is broken."
