The Government and the leadership of the PSOE are not willing to drop the bones of the political controversy unleashed by Alberto Núñez Feijóo's twist on pardons, amnesty or terrorism in the process during the contacts that the Popular Party maintained during the last summer with Junts per Catalunya before his finally failed investiture.
The general secretary of ERC, Marta Rovira, assured yesterday that the PP also proposed negotiating Feijóo's investiture, but that Oriol Junqueras' party did not spend a second studying the offer. Last night the ERC deputy, Teresa Jordà, explained to RNE the conversation she had with Carlos Floriano in August.
“Floriano called me because he was working on Feijóo's investiture. I picked up the order and told him that I found it difficult,” revealed the Catalan deputy, who confirmed that in the end both formations were not seen. “I didn't say no, but I told him I was asking, although I told him it would be difficult. The PP is the one who put gasoline in the Catalan conflict. It was complicated and that's how I told him,” she said.
And although the PP denied it, by reducing it to a mere “informal and colloquial” conversation between deputies Carlos Floriano and Teresa Jordà, the Government and the PSOE also added this fleeting contact to their offensive against Feijóo's “lies.” .
The socialist spokespersons in the Government, in the PSOE executive and in the Congress of Deputies –Pilar Alegría, Esther Peña and Patxi López– added this contact between the PP and ERC to their offensive strategy against Feijóo.
The PSOE spokesperson, Esther Peña, stressed in turn that, after contacts with Junts, the PP “also wanted to sit down and ask ERC for votes.” “We only have to know if the PP also asked for Bildu's votes,” she demanded. And the organization secretary of the PSOE, Santos Cerdán, continued to criticize the contacts of the PP and ERC: “In the morning they try to dissolve pro-independence parties, at night they try to make agreements with them.”
The socialist spokesperson in Congress, Patxi López, also denounced “the great hypocrisy” of the PP. “What else is behind those conversations that he had with Junts and those that he has been able to have with ERC? Because everything is now a lie upon a lie and he has no credibility in anything he says,” he stressed.
The Popular Party involved Junts in the Galician election campaign, but they did not expect Esquerra to take advantage of the moment. Rovira's statements are one more element that clouds the PP's electoral race in Galicia and endangers its absolute majority.
“He proposed that we talk and negotiate,” he explained from Geneva in an interview on the Ser la Republicana network in reference to Floriano. “We responded that we did not speak with the PP and that there was only the possibility of forming a democratic bloc, the progressive bloc,” Rovira added with respect to a contact that Feijóo's party limited to an inconsequential talk in which Floriano commented to Jordà that they would have to let the candidate with the most votes govern in the general elections of July 23 of last year.
In any case, ERC's distrust of the Popular Party is absolute. Rovira made it clear that an understanding is impossible. The Government did the same through its spokesperson, Patrícia Plaja. He underestimated first that, according to the Republicans, the PP offered them to negotiate and, second, any declaration of intentions by the Popular Party that goes along the lines of favoring independence interests or any attempt to soften their position.
The Executive of Pere Aragonès does not believe in any goodism because, according to Plaja, the words of Alberto Núñez Feijóo always have a common point or common thread: “Catalanophobia.” With this premise, the Government affirmed that it will never sit down “to negotiate an investiture with the PP and Vox.”
“They fuel hatred against Catalonia,” Plaja stressed. “Regardless of this improbable and almost surreal chapter by Feijóo, they are the spearhead of the repression against Catalonia,” she said immediately afterwards.
However, he clarified that the current Government is willing to debate day-to-day issues, such as education, drought or economic issues with the PP. But never, Plaja reiterated, discuss an investiture of a popular candidate with the extreme right.
