The European Commission is starting to step on the brakes on the ecological transition. La Vanguardia reported this on its front page yesterday and the Brussels correspondent, Beatriz Navarro, explained that the green agenda is on a tightrope for multiple reasons that refer to the cost of energy and international tensions. Europe talks about the war in Ukraine. Spain talks about ETA.
There are peasant protests in various countries, the latest one in Poland (over the import of Ukrainian grain), an agrarian-based political movement is putting the Dutch liberal right in check, the European People's Party is nervous, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, concerned about the consolidation of the National Front as an alternative, calls for a regulatory pause. "There is no need to change any more rules, otherwise we are going to lose a lot of people along the way," he said. Ursula von der Leyen has picked up the gauntlet: "We should pay more attention to the ability to absorb changes."
Brussels is beginning to step on the green brake, and this could be the big issue in Spain today. But the Spanish policy that is manufactured in Madrid, that is, the dominant policy, has boarded the ETA bus, it has been in there for a week and yesterday a passenger pressed the button that keeps the doors closed.
The Popular Party fails to get out of the Bildu curve with its wheels well aligned after having managed to break the calm campaign proposed by the PSOE, with a succession of daily announcements referring to the daily life of the people, thanks to the serious mistake of EH Bildu by including former ETA militants who have served sentences for blood crimes on some of their local lists.
Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who obsessively pursues the absolute majority in the Community of Madrid, to rise up as the indisputable counterpower of Pedro Sánchez -and, therefore, of Alberto Núñez Feijóo-, accelerated yesterday by demanding the illegalization of Bildu. “ETA is alive, it is in power, it lives off our money, it undermines our institutions, it wants to destroy Spain, deprive millions of Spaniards of their constitutional rights and provoke a confrontation,” she said. Aznar 100%. The former president had said the day before that the PSOE can only govern Spain with the support of Bildu and the Catalan separatists and that the next price to pay will be holding consultations in Catalonia and the Basque Country. The historic mission of the Popular Party, he added, is to prevent it.
Illegalization of Bildu. Illegalization of parties in the face of the objective difficulty of reforming the electoral law, shielded to a large extent by the 1978 Constitution. This is the path indicated yesterday by the president of Madrid and by her main adviser, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, whose biography is closely linked to Aznar's. Illegalize matches. Today, in the Basque Country; tomorrow, in Catalonia. That path does not currently interest Núñez Feijóo, who fears a general mobilization of the Catalan, Basque and Navarrese electorate, and of the left in general. The current president of the PP wants a Catalonia in a bain-marie and open paths to a pact with the PNV. Threatening Bildu with outlawing is giving it wings in Euskadi and Navarra against the cautious interests of Sabin Etxea. Last night, in Barcelona, Feijóo asked to "change the conversation."
Aznarism usually has problems with the thermostat. Heating the campaign with Bildu can work. Bringing the kettle to a boil is another matter. The PP spokesperson in Congress, Cuca Gamarra, had to contradict Ayuso: "The party law does not allow Bildu to be outlawed." Consuelo Ordóñez, president of Covite, the entity that denounced the presence of convicted ETA members on the Bildu lists last week, accused Díaz Ayuso of trivializing the issue and of "not respecting the dead and their families." [Ordóñez is the sister of a Basque PP leader assassinated by ETA]. Yesterday, the Prosecutor's Office of the National Court filed a complaint against the Bildu lists on the grounds that there is no crime, since the former ETA convicts have completed their sentences.
The thermostat is out of control. And it rains.
