The next day, a Pedro Sánchez was seen in Vilnius (Lithuania) enraged by "the mountain of lies" that let Alberto Núñez Feijóo go, while the president of the PP was perceived as left and facing Ciudad Real for the result of the debate in Atresmedia. Sánchez had a NATO summit and Feijóo, a campaign rally.
Both expressed satisfaction with their roles in the debate, but the feeling is that the president found it difficult to sleep and the aspirant slept through the night in one go. Maybe it was because the responsibilities of the next day were very different for one and the other. Or maybe it was because Sánchez found the Tourmalet "a mountain of lies" and his legs didn't respond as he expected, while Feijóo escaped uphill.
José María Aznar commented, shortly after arriving in the Government, that he had realized that power changed the view that people had of those who wield it. He compared it to the yellow jersey of the leader of the Tour, which imposes respect on the rest of the pilot, to the point of allowing him to achieve victories that he would not have imagined.
Pedro Sánchez soon learned this, who in a few months went from being shunned by his party to being admired for his tenacity and resilience, which led him in a short time to put himself back at the head of the PSOE and achieve a year later the presidency of the Government. But both Aznar and Sánchez learned that a leader's worst enemy is being seen as arrogant.
The president's advisers took a lot of care so that he did not appear as a presumptuous, an adjective with which the popular often try to denigrate him. So the feeling is that he lacked aggression and had plenty of smiles. On the contrary to Feijóo, who came out uninhibited, ready to charge the rival in the first minute, with great elegance and no scruples.
The fiasco that the confrontation turned into baffled the socialist. The president of the PP knew how to stop the comeback that could be feared, but also gave a solid image. In any case, there is still a long stretch to the finish line. Eddy Merckx said something that Sánchez knows well: "The race is won by the cyclist who knows how to suffer the most".
