“They don’t give the numbers.” This is how the PP clears up questions from the press about a possible motion of censure against Pedro Sánchez. The phrase was said by Alberto Núñez Feijóo himself this week in an informal conversation with journalists. The same Feijóo who just a month ago asked for the support of the Government’s partners to oust the president, who tempted Junts and PNV with pardons for his own investiture in 2023, who sends habitual laudatory messages towards the Catalan and Basque right, believes that only the courts will be able to prevent the socialist leader from completing his third term.
Feijóo threw the stone, but hid his hand immediately. The president of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, said in October that she “would not go anywhere with those who despise Spain, they are not trustworthy.” After Feijóo’s words, he assured: “I don’t want anything with nationalism.” Last week, at the Conference of Presidents, she visibly uncomfortable chose not to answer questions about a possible understanding between her party and Junts.
“They don’t give the numbers” is the mantra, even after Vox has opened up to supporting a technical motion of censure to go to elections. The PP also does not reveal whether Junts’ initiative for Sánchez to submit to a vote of confidence will have its support. The fear they have is that both votes will give results favorable to the Government, and this is what Feijóo expressed this Wednesday at the PP’s traditional ‘Christmas cup’: “I have no interest in confirming the Government.”
In the PP they foresee a “judicial hell” for Sánchez in 2025. And they trust in its political consequences. In the national address of Madrid’s Calle de Génova, the idea has been established that the President of the Government may end up indicted next year. They are not clear about the cause. But just as at the time they tried to rename what was known as the ‘Tito Berni case’ the ‘Tito Sánchez case’, without any success, they now hope that the fraud cases against the businessman Víctor de Aldama, the derivatives that affect José Luis Ábalos and Koldo García for the masks, or the investigations into his wife, Begoña Gómez, lead to a request from the Supreme Court to Congress to charge Sánchez. And from there, to elections.
Feijóo again accused the Government of trying to intimidate the judges, of attacking those who are investigating the PSOE and the president’s entourage. Yes, a few weeks ago Pedro Sánchez assured that some magistrates are “opposing” him and that the PP “plays with the cards marked.” That is, it has advance information about the cases being heard in different courts. In some of them, the PP is represented as a popular accusation.
This same Friday, a Madrid judge summoned Pedro Sánchez to conciliation for a lawsuit from Ayuso’s partner after the President of the Government said that “the Prosecutor’s Office is pursuing the criminal” in defense of the State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz .
“Sánchez is going to fall no matter what,” is the mantra that they tirelessly repeat in the PP. And Sánchez will have no choice but to dissolve the Cortes and call elections “to stop the hemorrhage” of loss of votes caused precisely by the judicial scandals, in the words of the opposition leader. Feijóo went so far as to call the president on Wednesday a “patient in the ICU who is visibly worsening and with no expected discharge.” And if in the end he is charged, he will have no choice but to call Spaniards to the polls.
The national PP thus replicates the messages that are manufactured on the second floor, Génova, 13, where Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s party has its headquarters. The wedges reach the upper plants almost as they are generated. This same Thursday, the president’s Chief of Staff pointed out Sánchez with his already media-friendly “pa’lante” and called him corrupt and a dictator.
In the noble floors of Genoa they have assumed the thesis of the “State operation” against Ayuso due to the investigations opened against her partner, who confessed to the Tax Agency several tax crimes. This same Friday, the emerging deputy secretary Ester Muñoz said that the Prosecutor’s Office is “to investigate crimes, not to commit them and then erase the evidence,” in reference to the attorney general, Álvaro García Ortiz.
All, while the National Court investigates the operations of the Ministry of the Interior of the Government of Mariano Rajoy against the Catalan independence movement or against Podemos. Or while Justice sentences the former economic vice president of the Aznar governments, Rodrigo Rato, to almost five years in prison for his tax cheats.
“You have to be prepared for anything,” Feijóo told a handful of his regional barons last Monday. The leader of the PP called his National Executive Committee to a meeting that had many more absences than presences, and warned that 2025 would be “a very intense year” for them. “Don’t tell me I’m not warning you,” he snapped.
No electoral call is scheduled for 2025 on the calendar. The first on the horizon will be that of Castilla y León, almost in the spring of 2026. Despite the parliamentary problems that it is dragging on, the regional president, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, has completely ruled out a preview
It is not ruled out that some community does go to the polls, for example Extremadura or the Balearic Islands. But that is not what Feijóo is thinking about, who ruled out before journalists that he wants to pressure his barons to prevent the PSOE from experiencing a blank year of elections. If the Government achieves the 2025 General Budgets, and the PP sees it as feasible, a full year without calls can allow Sánchez to breathe and rearm. Hence the importance of the judicial front for Feijóo.
From bipartisanship to “bibloquism”
Feijóo has also assumed the bloc policy that he himself spoke out against. It was 2020, Pablo Casado was at the head of the PP and the then president of the Xunta de Galicia was asking for “state policies” for his own party, in addition to “moderation and encounter.”
He also did so at the end of his first year as national leader of the PP. And before the elections of July 23, 2023, when he asked to “break the blocks in society and politics.”
But the leader of the PP now maintains that Spain has gone “from the two-party system” that prevailed since the 80s of the last century, to the current “bibloquism.” That is, two confronting “blocks” condemned to not understand each other. And in the right block is Vox, already completely naturalized for the PP.
The difference with the previous era is that those who were a hinge between the PP and the PSOE, today they are not. At least for now. Neither the PNV nor the post-convergent family that has taken the reins of Junts are in a position to support the Spanish right except in specific moments.
It has happened in some votes in this legislature, especially when budget negotiations are at their peak, with the tax on electricity generation and energy companies as the main achievements. PNV and Junts added their votes to PP and Vox despite having reached an agreement with the Government for the fiscal package.
The PP suffers from a certain dichotomy in its relationship with Basque and Catalan right-wing nationalism. One day they are “coup plotters” and “enemies of Spain” and another they can help an investiture or lend votes for tax counter-reforms. One PP leader can boast of negotiating “with everyone, except Bildu” and another swear and perjure that he has not exchanged roles with Carles Puigdemont almost at the same time that a third colleague confirms that yes, there are obviously conversations.
The case of the amendments to the fiscal package is paradigmatic. On Wednesday, the PP denied any negotiations and wanted to convince the press that the possible coincidental votes would be a “coincidence”, while Miguel Tellado confirmed the contacts.
On Wednesday, Feijóo accused Sánchez’s associates of being “accomplices” of the president. “The PNV has decided to be a structural ally of the Government,” he lamented. And he added: “Junts is at least consistent with its economic program.”
Defense of Mazon
Feijóo maintains that “in the right-wing bloc there is enormous stability” in the vote. What changes, he defends, is “how it is distributed” between the PP and Vox. And at this moment, the transfer on the right is in favor of Vox.
The reason is the DANA in Valencia on October 29 and the management of the floods, in which at least 223 people died. The leader of the PP hesitated in the first days, but in the end he chose to close ranks with the president of the Valencian Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, who was missing for much of the tragic day in October.
Feijóo defended to journalists on Wednesday that Mazón “had no competence” in matters of emergencies despite being the president of the regional government. In fact, the leader of the PP expressly pointed out the president of the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation, Miguel Polo, as responsible for the tragedy, whom he criticized for not having “listened to his voice.”
According to the thesis of the PP leader, the state body did not give precise information to the Generalitat and, therefore, the appropriate measures were not taken on October 29. Feijóo doesn’t care that the University of Valencia had canceled classes the day before, a decision that Mazón considered exaggerated; also that Valencian public television broadcast for hours the floods that, since the morning, had flooded a good part of the province; or that the local councils in the area launched alerts on their own to warn their neighbors of the magnitude of what was coming.
Feijóo shot from elevation. The fault lies with Polo and, therefore, with the person who appointed him: Teresa Ribera. The former vice president of the Government and today ‘number two’ of the European Commission remains at the center of the PP’s target, which went to great lengths in Brussels to overthrow her candidacy. Without success.
Feijóo told parliamentary reporters that the PP will increase compared to the previous cycle in all the autonomous communities, except those with an absolute majority. And in the Valencian Community, where polls reinforce Vox in the right-wing bloc.
The leader of the PP believes it is possible to recover votes between now and 2027, when it should be decided whether or not Mazón repeats as a candidate. To defend his baron, Feijóo has chosen to question the actions of Justice in his eagerness to investigate possible responsibilities in the management of DANA.
The Valencian courts had up to seven pieces open, and the provincial Prosecutor’s Office has reported in favor of grouping them all into one to be instructed by the Superior Court of Justice.
A decision that Feijóo and Tellado expressly attributed to the attorney general. To do this, they relied on information from OkDiario that revealed an alleged dinner by Álvaro García Ortiz with the provincial prosecutors.
“If I were the attorney general of the State, I would be more concerned about my situation than about Mazón’s,” said Feijóo, who downplayed the investigations: “I have not seen Mazón being directly pointed out, they are a series of complaints that are “They go to the investigating court and nothing more.” Tellado expressly spoke of “very crude maneuvers” by García Ortiz, former Environmental Prosecutor in Galicia during the Feijóo mandates. Because the action of justice is questionable, or not, depending on who it is directed against.
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