It was not an anecdote. The first exchange between Alberto Núñez Feijóo, now leader of the opposition, and Pedro Sánchez, recently elected by Parliament as President of the Government, was not limited to the usual institutional greeting from loser to winner. When Feijóo approached to shake Sánchez’s hand, as soon as the vote for the socialist candidate was successful, he launched a serious reproach to him. “This is a mistake,” he told her, looking into her eyes, about his investiture. Sánchez smiled without letting go of her hand, while a cloud of photographers captured the scene, full of tension.
Feijóo’s phrase is a declaration of intentions. Although during the debate he has assumed that the socialist president has been elected by a “legitimate parliamentary majority,” the PP leader does not believe that a normal legislature will be launched. Feijóo attaches the utmost seriousness to the agreements with the pro-independence parties on which the next Government will be based, so he faces the new stage with “democratic alerts on”, as he said as soon as he left the chamber. The leader of the PP is preparing for a dog-faced opposition, which removes the possibility of state pacts with the progressive coalition.
Feijóo has definitively closed a cycle this Thursday. The one he opened a year and seven months ago in Seville, when he suddenly assumed the leadership of the PP after the defenestration of Pablo Casado. In April 2022, he arrived at the throne of the PP required by the barons to avoid the shipwreck of the party, but he soon righted the ship’s course and created expectations of governing. The goal was close after the regional and municipal elections last May, in which the Popular Party swept away the territorial power of the Socialists. But Sánchez, a bold politician, the complete opposite of Feijóo, a conservative in the broad sense of the word, made an attempt and won.
On the night of July 23, one of the worst days of Feijóo’s political life, the socialist leader managed to avoid an absolute majority of PP and Vox that would have put the Galician politician directly in La Moncloa. After the coup, the leader of the PP did not throw in the towel, and forced an investiture before that of the PSOE to try to bring an impossible combination of Vox and the PNV to power. Until today.
That the PP did everything possible to make Feijóo’s failed investiture prosper has been made evident by this Thursday’s clash with the PNV in Congress. “Someday I will tell what they offered us a couple of months ago,” the Peneuvista spokesman, Aitor Esteban, said enigmatically early in the morning from the rostrum. Shortly after, The Basque Journal has published that the popular ones even offered to the Basque party to enter their Government by occupying the Ministry of Industry.
The PP denies this information, which however fits into the courtship by land, sea and air that Feijóo launched in September to the PNV. After their failed dialogue, and with the horizon of elections in Euskadi in the coming months, the relationship between both parties is now extremely hostile. “Alberto,” Aitor Esteban said to Feijóo this Thursday, using his familiar name. “Your tractor’s engine has seized from using Vox oil.”
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After the vote that made Sánchez president by 179 votes, Feijóo has not given the PSOE leader a second of respite. As soon as he left the chamber, he baptized him as “a president intervened by the independence movement.” Thus began their relentless opposition.
The leader of the PP has shown himself to be “concerned” about the situation in which Sánchez will govern, “subject to a monthly contract that the independence movement must sign.” “I honestly believe that the fact that next Wednesday the European Parliament will debate the basis of this investiture, which is an amnesty law for independence, is the worst way to start a legislature. “It affects our international reputation and, without a doubt, our democracy.” In reality, it has been the PP that has forced this debate on the amnesty in the European Parliament, because the popular ones are also going to oppose the Government from Brussels.
The atmosphere with which the legislature begins between the PP and the PSOE could not be more tense. During the investiture vote, the Popular Parliamentary Group has been pointing out on its account on the social network #EverythingForTheChair. Today he surrenders his principles and votes yes to the investiture of Pedro Sánchez in exchange for the amnesty.” Sources from Feijóo’s team have later defended this initiative as “an exercise in memory.” In the course of the debate, in addition, the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, was captured by the Congress cameras calling Sánchez a “son of a bitch” when he mentioned his internal war with Pablo Casado. The Madrid leader has not retracted those words.
The popular ones are pressured by Vox to radicalize the opposition to the PSOE. Some leaders are concerned about the increasingly anti-system drift of the extreme right. “If the PP flirted with that, the fuse could be lit” of a social outbreak, these voices acknowledged during the debate, from which Vox ended up absenting itself to go protest in front of the PSOE headquarters. Previously, from the podium, Santiago Abascal had threatened the PP with breaking up its autonomous governments if the PP processes the amnesty law in the Senate, where it has an absolute majority. The popular ones assure that they will not pay attention to the ultras and that they will process the law, although they have reformed the regulations to delay it.
With the right in combustion, the PP leadership recognizes that the bridges are broken with the PSOE. “I would like for the good of Spain not to, but it is not the PP that has said that there is a wall that separates Spain in two… That is what the president said,” defended the Institutional Deputy Secretary of the PP, Esteban González. Pons, in the halls of Congress. Nobody doubts in the PP that this will not be a legislature of State pacts. In their parliamentary duel, Feijóo even suggested to Sánchez that he will not be available to agree on joint action by the two major parties if the independentists return to the unilateral path. “When the independence movement fails you,” he warned the new president, “don’t look for me.”
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