“We cannot allow ourselves to be blackmailed by anyone!” cried Felipe González. The former president of the Government, at 81 years old, admitted that his legs are already failing. But not the voice, nor the spirit to play loudly. “We cannot allow ourselves to be blackmailed by anyone, much less by minorities in danger of extinction!” González warned.
Alongside him, Alfonso Guerra also called not to take a step back, not to resign and to forcefully reject the amnesty and the self-determination referendum. “Accepting this aggression in silence would make us complicit in the breakdown of the constitutional pact!” warned the former vice president of the government, who is also 83 years old.
The crowd packed in the stalls and the upper floor of the main chair of the ancient Athenaeum of Madrid, where a good part of the Old Testament of the PSOE that maintains González and Guerra as its great patriarchs was concentrated, burst into applause. Many of them, standing.
Felipe and Alfonso, as they always called them, with a mixture of pride, admiration and even fear, are united again, hand in hand, after decades of friction and ruptures, their faithful congratulated each other. “Would anyone be surprised if I don't agree?” González admitted as soon as Guerra finished stringing together his admonitions against the change of opinion that they both agreed to attribute to Pedro Sánchez.
The alarm is that, to get his inauguration back on track, Sánchez will adopt an amnesty law against those accused of the process that he flatly denied until the general elections on July 23. “I have not been disloyal or dissident, rather the other has been, who has been changing,” Guerra defended and criticized, alluding to Sánchez.
“I am defending the party's positions,” González agreed. And he recalled that not only Sánchez, but also the leader of the PSC, Salvador Illa, stated until the elections that neither amnesty nor self-determination is possible. “The paradox we experience, Alfonso, is that we defend the party's positions,” he insisted. It is therefore the current leader of the PSOE who lost his way.
“There is no amnesty, nor is there any room for self-determination,” said González, who equated the referendum demanded by the Catalan independence movement with the “self-destruction” of Spain.
Guerra launched a harsh diatribe against the Catalan independence movement. Among other issues, he warned that “in Catalonia there is no full freedom.” For example, to speak the “mother tongue” of many of its inhabitants, which is Spanish. And he assured that there are even “inspectors” who prevent children from speaking Spanish in the school yard. Again, big applause.
Among the attendees, to whom Guerra himself warned first of all that it was not "a plot or a conspiracy", an intention that he only attributed to "a lunatic mind", since it was the presentation of his latest book, The Rose and the thorns (La Esfera), there were the president of Castilla-La Mancha, Emiliano García-Page, and other former socialist regional presidents, such as the Aragonese Javier Lambán, the Asturian Javier Fernández, the Andalusian José Rodríguez de la Borbolla or the Extremaduran Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra. Also Nicolás Redondo Terreros, recently expelled from the PSOE.
And many former ministers of the Gonzalez and War terms, such as Jose Barrionuevo, Jose Luis Corcuera, Rosa Conde, Virgil Shoemaker, Javier Saenz de Cosculluela, Fernando Ledesma or Matilde Fernandez.
“War has cut off his ear,” summed up ironically, at the exit, one of the attendees of the socialist Old Testament coven. “Two!” they confirmed.
