It already happened to Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba when he led the PSOE. But for years now, Pedro Sánchez and everyone in the current socialist leadership has been biting their tongues – so as not to add fuel to the fire or give ammunition to the right – in the face of Emiliano García-Page's inveterate habit of setting his own profile and differentiating himself from the official line of his party. Above all in the territorial issue, and especially given the policy deployed by the Government in Catalonia and the latest negotiations and agreements with the pro-independence parties. Until now.
The president of Castilla-La Mancha and political heir of José Bono, the only socialist autonomous leader who maintains an absolute majority in all of Spain after the May 2023 elections, nevertheless found his match yesterday by exceeding the patience of the leadership of the PSOE. This time there was already a public response to Page's criticism. And very hard.
The president of La Mancha took advantage of his attendance at the Madrid Tourism Fair to express a forceful criticism against the amendment to the Amnesty law agreed upon the day before between the PSOE, Junts and Esquerra. “There is no good terrorism and bad terrorism,” Page warned. “Terrorism is terrorism, and it means having the intention to generate terror,” he stressed. In the independence protests in Catalonia, he assured, “many people organizedly wanted to generate social terror.”
The immediate response came from the organizational secretary of the PSOE, Santos Cerdán: “All terrorism is bad.” “The problem raised by others is, what is terrorism? I think the vast majority of us know it and you should know it,” Cerdán replied to Page. This time, the PSOE leadership did not want to ignore their criticism. Not even biting your tongue.
And what's more, in Ferraz they warned that Page this time met his true match, precisely, with “the toughest” of his leaders, Minister Óscar Puente, already reincorporated into the leadership of the PSOE. The president of La Mancha also denounced that, in his opinion, the PSOE is right now “on the outskirts of the Constitution, about to step on the constitutional border,” in the face of the repeated demands of Carles Puigdemont and the pro-independence groups.
And there Page already encountered Puente, who does not usually tune bagpipes and directed a hard frontal attack on him. “The person who has been on the outskirts of the PSOE has been Page for quite some time, we are at the center of the Constitution,” Puente replied.
Page later tried to modulate his criticism of the party: “The problem is Puigdemont, it is not the PSOE. “Puigdemont wants the PSOE to get out of its place and take us to the border, to the outskirts,” he clarified, since in his opinion the former president not only seeks amnesty but “impunity.”
But Page did not give in to Puente, and once again claimed his absolute majority in Castilla-La Mancha, in a veiled allusion to the fact that the minister lost the mayoralty of Valladolid after the last municipal elections. Although Puente's list was the most voted list in these elections, the alliance of the PP with the far-right Vox snatched the mayor's office from him.
“I have spent my entire life winning elections for the right,” Page alleged. “I would care if others did the same: beat the PP. Whoever wins on the right and the extreme right is not in any suburb. "I win the elections, let's see if I'm going to have to apologize for winning the elections," she concluded.
The PSOE leadership assures that they have no intention of applying disciplinary measures against Page, despite the fact that they declare themselves fed up with his constant criticism of the party's official line, revalidated this weekend at a political convention held in A Coruña to which The socialist leader of Castilla-La Mancha also did not attend. It is already customary for Page not to attend Sánchez's calls or to the meetings of the PSOE federal committee, but on this occasion he excused his presence because he had a trip scheduled to China. “He's starting to get tired,” they admit to Ferraz.
This public clash in the PSOE dynamited in any case the Government's strategy to justify the latest amendments to the amnesty negotiated with the independentists. “Let's be serious,” the Minister of the Presidency and Justice, Félix Bolaños, had demanded, given the intense political and legal debate that arose. “Does anyone really believe that the independence process is comparable to the terrorism that Spain suffered for decades?” he asked. “What we all understand by terrorism, what Spain suffered during decades of terrorism, is outside the amnesty,” Bolaños stated.
