There is no such thing as an electoral campaign, and there are elections in Andalusia within a month, to try to find a declaration of war in any statement with which to attack the adversary. And that is what Vox and Ciudadanos did this Monday, who took advantage of a response from the general coordinator of the PP, Elías Bendodo, in an interview in the newspaper 'El Mundo', in which he defended "Catalan nationality", and the misrepresentation of some means of communication that he interpreted as defending the plurinationality of Spain, to attack the PP.
The number three of the PP responded in the interview, to the question of whether he had seen someone defend Catalan nationality before, that he had even "heard Aznar publicly affirm that Spain was a plurinational, pluricultural and plurilingual State. That is a reality. Catalonia is not a nation within Spain. Nation is not the same as nationality. This is clear: Catalonia is indeed a nationality of the Spanish State, like any other autonomous community. The PP has to reconnect with Catalan society" .
Basically, Bendodo did nothing more than repeat what Alberto Núñez Feijóo had said, on May 6, at a conference at the Círculo de Economía, in Barcelona, when he defined Catalonia as a nationality, using the term included in article 2 of the Constitution where it says that "the Constitution is based on the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation, the common and indivisible homeland of all Spaniards, and recognizes and guarantees the right to autonomy of the nationalities and regions that comprise it and the solidarity between All of them".
But Bendodo's words provoked the reaction of the other two parties of the center and the right. The president of Vox, Santiago Abascal, immediately underlined his concern about Bendodo's words, because when one "does not have faith in the nation, it does not defend its borders, it does not fight its enemies, it does not defend the freedoms and rights of the Spanish, and ends up agreeing with anyone to get power".
Abascal had no doubt in assigning to Bendodo the affirmation that Spain was a plurinational State, with which his conclusion is that, for the PP, "Spain is not a nation" and he assigned Núñez Feijóo the affirmation that "Galicia is a nation without a state", and added that the problem with these declarations is that they "demonstrate their little faith in the nation".
For her part, the president of Cs, Inés Arrimadas, stressed that Bendodo comes to say that "Spain is not a nation and that within it there are first-class and second-class territories." And the leader of Ciudadanos in Catalonia, Carlos Carrizosa, was harsher: "The new PP assuming the podemita discourse of the plurinational State. If the alternative to sanchismo is this, turn off and let's go."
All these criticisms and interpretations led Elías Bendodo to clarify his statement the day before, with a message on Twitter, in which he pointed out that perhaps he had not expressed himself well. And because he wanted to make his thinking clear, he repeated: "Spain is an indissoluble nation of 17 autonomies with their own identities. The differences of each autonomous community can be respected and a single Spain that respects article 2 of the Constitution can be defended" .
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