Seven days. It is the time that Alberto Núñez Feijóo has taken to pass the government’s chef decree to announce irrelevant support to a reduced version that, despite the thinning, includes all the measures with which the PP justified its ‘no’ to a norm which meant raising pensions, granting aid for the DANA or maintaining subsidies to public transport. The PP will vote ‘yes’ to anti -skucios protection and also support what defined as “immoral” return of a building to the PNV. It will in short, a decree of which they are “against” to “launch a message to pensioners.”
The division between those who were in favor of supporting the decree and those who wanted to stay in the ‘no’ had more of strategic debate than ideological. To make the decision, the real incidence of the decree in the life of the Spaniards has not been analyzed, but the media and electoral impact for Feijóo.
In the end, in the number 13 of the Madrid street of Genoa that houses the national headquarters of the PP, the memory of the 2023 electoral campaign has been stronger than the ‘no to everything’ what Sánchez proposes.
In the days before the elections that could end the Feijóo coalition government gave an interview on TVE marked by a confrontation between the opposition leader and the journalist Silvia Intxaurrondo on account precisely of the pensions.
Feijóo said his party had always raised pensions according to the CPI. A falsehood since during the governments of Mariano Rajoy this update did not always occur. The PP leader engaged with the journalist when he reminded him of that data, and both he and his party accused Intxaurrondo. Two days later he had to recognize his mistake, although he never apologized to the TVE journalist.
For Feijóo, that interview was fundamental in his insufficient victory of 23J. The PP won, but four deputies separated him that he could add with Vox to reach the Moncloa. In Genoa they do not forgive the journalist’s performance, to which spokesmen usually dedicate more or less direct and explicit comments so when.
That interview led to the foreground and in full campaign a very uncomfortable reality for the PP, which has always sold itself as a party that offers stability and defends pensioners, and for Feijóo himself, who presumes to be a party with “traceability.”
And that uncomfortable reality is that, at least since the economic crisis of three years ago, the PP legislates and votes against improving the public pension system. Rajoy eliminated in 2013 the historic reference to the CPI for pension increases, introduced a mechanism that, in practice, was going to perpetuate minimum increases of 0.25%, regardless of the price increase. Before that law, the PP Executive already decreed two revaluation below the CPI. After approving the reform, every year until the 2018 censure motion were resolved with minimal increases.
Junts negotiated
The calculation they made in Genoa before the first vote of the decree was that the Government was going to be unable to retain Junts as parliamentary ally. Without the votes of Carles Puigdemont, Pedro Sánchez does not have a sufficient majority to legislate. The former president of the Generalitat, fled from Justice in Belgium, calculated the argument of the PP and claimed to “chop” the Omnibus decree in as many decrees as necessary to approve each measure independently.
In the PP they saw it clear and strengthened their message. Feijóo claimed two independent decrees for pensions, the DANA and the grant to transport. Everything else should be left out, especially the measures to avoid the eviction of vulnerable families, which their popular directly linked to support for the occupation, or the return of a palace in Paris to the PNV.
This was written on his Twitter account in a post that was set for days. The PP even opened a signature plan online (on the Change.org platform) and on the streets. Genoa mobilized territorial organizations to install tents and tenderetes in the streets of towns and cities to collect support against the government and in favor of raising pensions.
The web campaign remains active. This Friday, the last day of January, just over 34,000 people appeared as signatories of a petition that expressly says that the decree includes “unacceptable issues, such as the rise from VAT to basic foods and light, greater protection of the squatters or the gift of a palace to the PNV ”. “Obviously, Spain’s first game will never undergo this type of blackmail,” says the message.
But Junts negotiated. Those of Puigdemont also raised the flag against the “inquiokupas” (expression with which one wants to hide that the decree protects vulnerable families who rent to owners of 10 homes or more) or taxes, but were content to get other issues out of document Purely economic: tax matters and almost 10,000 million euros of deliveries on account to the autonomous communities.
The first decree, against which Feijóo voted, included them. The second, which will support, no. In total, 8,036 million frozen that should go to administrations controlled by barons of the PP and that at the moment they must wait.
The government agreement with Junts took the PP with the changed foot. In the first moments they attacked the Executive and defended that with their ‘no’ of the previous week they had managed to show Sánchez’s “weakness.” In addition, Juns NLP on the issue of trust whose reformulation has not yet been registered in Congress was noted as their own victory.
“We have done what the electorate wanted and that is tested,” Feijóo’s strategists said. The same ones who now defend Highly that not supporting the new decree would be punished by those same voters.
The reality is that fear in Genoa was palpable. 24 hours before the Government-Junts pact was announced, Feijóo went to Córdoba where, with President Juan Manuel Moreno of witness, he said that pensioners are “sacred” for the PP, while announcing a program on behalf of their barons of vaccination for the elderly that their own regional governments had rejected. All in the facilities of a residence of elders.
The turn rushed in the next 48 hours. Sánchez announced the agreement with Junts, Borja Sémper gave a press conference in which he attacked the pact and criticized the content of the decree. On Wednesday, the national spokesman himself said that his party was “quiet” because the revaluation of pensions would finally go ahead. And shortly after the ‘yes’ of the PP to the new text was confirmed.
Traceability against pensions
“I am satisfied with what you have to do,” he assured Eldiario.es a leader of the PP as soon as the turn of his boss of ranks was known. Other sources of Genoa went from defending the ‘no’ with a hard time to join the choir of those who applaud the turn to the ‘yes’.
And where the PNV palace was a red line became something irrelevant, as the general secretary, Cuca Gamarra, said by ensuring that the building was already going to be the property of the Basque Party, with or without validation of the decree.
The problem of the PP is to know what to do in the medium and long term with a topic of great economic and social draft and, therefore, electoral. Especially for the popular ones, who have their most faithful voters niche among the elderly.
Feijóo has repeated these days that his party has always revalued pensions according to CPI. A falsehood that already earned him the journalistic reproach in campaign and the consequences at the polls in 2023. But that is that the same year, the PP that the Galician already directed voted against an important pension reform agreed by the Government and the European Commission. Vox abstention saved that vote.
He was recalled by Feijóo this Thursday in an act on housing. “Of whom he supported the reform of Sánchez’s pensions in 2023, who gave Sánchez free to mangrove with European funds without any control, who often seems to have more interest in replacing the PP than to replace the PSOE, We cannot accept lessons, blackmail, or pressures, ”he said, referring to the extreme right that now tries to exploit the popular yes to the Omnibus decree.
It refers to a Royal Decree Law in Validado in 2023, with the previous coalition government. It was the second pension reform that came to reverse Rajoy’s cuts and to improve the income of the system via quotes to raise the benefits.
The PP voted against, next to what was left of citizens. Vox abstained and the decree was approved.
But today the leader of the PP already questioned in November 2022 the “possibilities” of “Spain to raise pensions” by 8%, as the government that was going to close the year inflation. Feijóo hinted, in fact, that pensioners did not want that increase.
The increase in pensions by 2023 was approved in a royal decree that, by nature, is not voted in Congress (it should not be confused with the Royal Decree-Law, which requires validation). What was voted was the budget item for Social Security. But the PP voted against the general budgets of 2023 and raised a return amendment.
Thus, the only real vote on the concrete increase of pensions by 2023 received the vote against the PP already with Feijóo at the noble plant of number 13 of Genoa Street in Madrid, where the national headquarters of its party is located.
Feijóo only followed the strategy of his predecessor, Pablo Casado, who in 2021 voted against the first pension reform, which again introduced into the law the obligation to link IPC and pensions.
The PP already reluctantly signed in 2018 the renewal of the Toledo Pact. Together with the PDECAT (today, Junts) and Citizens were forced to accept a document that ERC, then in hard struggle with united we can by the Catalan electorate, rejected.
Of the three reforms of the pension system undertaken since 2020 by the coalition government, the PP has only supported the last. The vote occurred on Wednesday as the much more famous Omnibus decree. Feijóo’s support was advanced in October by eldiario.es and the newspaper. The PP tried to deny that information. Now, those of Feijóo rely on that vote to explain their position on the pension system. But the noise after the vote and the subsequent strategic turn has helped anyone, or almost no one, has heard of his validation.
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