Feijóo loses the investiture and the two-month countdown begins for Sánchez

All the interventions that Feijóo made from the rostrum both on Tuesday and Wednesday were based, more than on an attempt to defend his own program, on the conviction that the acting head of the Executive will end up achieving his objective because no “principle” will He will stop for this, because he has no qualms about agreeing with Bildu (“the only party,” he said, “that should have a cordon sanitaire”) and because he is willing to give in to the demands of Carles Puigdemont and ERC, who have put in place the amnesty. to those accused of the process and an agreement to hold a self-determination referendum as conditions of their support. A kind of preventive motion of censure.

In his last turn, he reinforced that strategy. “He did not want to go out yesterday – he disgraced the president – because he cannot defend on the platform what he defended in front of all Spaniards two months ago.” Feijóo assumed that Sánchez’s decision to delegate the response to his speech to a representative as belligerent as Óscar Puente only confirms that he has already given in to secessionism. «He has decided to escape so as not to tell the truth. Silence gives consent. And we will see the intensity of his silence, what he grants and what he demands. What we will never be able to know is whether what you will give them will be enough, but that does not depend on you,” he reproached.

Aware of his defeat, the leader of the popular parties nevertheless proclaimed himself the moral winner of the debate. «He has been worth it, we have all been photographed – he said – he. With our words and our silences. Because it has been demonstrated that there is an alternative to the model of blackmail and concessions, those who do not believe in our country. And because it has shown that citizens went to the polls with information that was stolen from them.” “I am convinced that, if we had known what we know now,” he concluded, “this investiture would be different.”

Not all of Sánchez’s potential partners, however, took it for granted, neither yesterday nor today, that there will be another Government led by the Socialists like the leader of the opposition or like, in recent weeks, the acting president himself who, in A conversation with journalists at the UN headquarters in New York last week exhibited his “optimism.”

On the second day of the debate, it was the turn of Bildu, the PNV, BNG and the Canarian Coalition. Bildu was crystal clear. After identifying the PP with the 1978 regime that its spokesperson, Mertxe Aizpurua, openly said he wanted to “break”, he confirmed that he will give his support to the PSOE and said that he will do so motivated by three reasons: “anti-fascism, the defense of the working class and “survival” of the Basque nation. «We are on the right side; in that of human rights. he even said after accusing the popular people of being reactionary. Feijóo would later remember her conviction for advocating terrorism in 1984, when she was director of the magazine ‘Punto y Hora’, bought by ETA in 1978.

The PNV – which Feijóo crudely questioned and whose coherence he questioned so sharply that it provoked clear anger from its spokesperson, Aitor Esteban – however left the door open to a repeat election. Neither the PP nor the PSOE believe that this position responds to anything more than a negotiating trick. Hence the reproaches of the opposition leader, who devoted every reply to Esteban to highlight the contradictions of a party like the PNV preferring a Government of which Sumar is a part and a president to whom Andoni Ortuzar himself, president of the Euskadi Buru Batzar , accused an Executive led by him of treating them “like Kleenex.”

«What unites them? Do they go hand in hand in fiscal policy? Are they going to tell the Basque industry that their labor relations model is that of Sánchez? Do you share ideas regarding housing? Because it is Bildu that makes the laws and then you appeal,” Feijóo ironically said. Esteban had put on the table the main reason for his refusal to even discuss the possibility of supporting the president of the PP, with whom he has nevertheless met on two occasions in recent months. “There is a whale in the bathtub,” he said in reference to Vox. “Do you mean that you are not going to vote for a candidate who has Bildu in the middle?” That was also partly what irritated the nationalist spokesperson, Feijóo’s continuous appeals that the PNV is acting as a ‘pagafantasy’ by supporting someone who has boosted his main rival in Euskadi electorally by “whitewashing” him and turning him into a key interlocutor.