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Wednesdays are the days of Congress when the opposition shakes the Government and vice versa. Thursdays, at least Thursdays in recent months, are the days in which the Government’s allies, presumed or real, attack each other when it is time to vote on laws and decrees. In general, we try to maintain form, except if some games feel like they are going to be played a lot. Thursday of this week was one of them, because the slaps could be heard in the chamber and the hallways. A very gratifying spectacle for the right.
An amendment was voted that ends the tax on extraordinary profits of energy and oil companies. It was approved by 183 votes to 166 when PP, Vox, Junts and PNV joined. This tax, which is actually more correct to call a tax, has raised 1,164 million euros this year. The left had to surrender to the evidence that the majority of Congress is right-wing. Another thing is that it is not politically viable, so there is no chance of a motion of censure succeeding, as the PP well knows. Even so, it forces you to adjust your shot and know what can be approved. Some parliamentary groups seem to be unclear. Rather, they act crazy.
The end of 2024 is on par with what has been seen in the first year of the legislature. There is no solid majority, as existed with all its problems in the previous legislature. There is not one because it depends on Carles Puigdemont’s state of mind, which let’s say became volatile when he realized that the Supreme Court managed to prevent him from benefiting from the amnesty law. During the Catalan election campaign, he was asked if he was worried about being imprisoned if he ran in Spain. He downplayed it and said that if it occurred, it would be “an arrest with little scope.” At the moment, he continues to live in Waterloo and has no plans to move.
It is not only Junts that makes the Government suffer. Once the Catalan nationalists show their rejection of a measure, that opens a way for the PNV to sneak in and position itself against proposals that it may have supported in the previous legislature. And then there is Podemos. Free from government responsibilities, he can oppose anything he doesn’t like. It has already decided that the Government has taken “a turn to the right” – as Ione Belarra defined it – without caring about how the correlation of forces in the Chamber influences the Government’s legislative production.
Puigdemont’s relations with the PSOE are now officially bad. It is not only that the former president said that “Pedro Sánchez is not trustworthy”, a common message in the PP, but that the last meeting in Switzerland ended badly. On other occasions with conflicting public statements, at least those contacts worked. At the moment, the total breakup is not imminent and we will have to wait until January to see how it is defined. Puigdemont expects Sánchez to pay what he believes he owes him, “although it is also possible to think that expect little or nothing from the PSOE and that what he intends is to make it clear that he has done everything possible and to justify the breakup to Catalan public opinion more easily,” according to José Antich in El Nacional, a medium that usually expresses his points of view, the obvious and the hidden.
Gabriel Rufián, who does not miss any opportunity to punish Junts, made it clearer. “To believe that Junts is worn out by voting for deeply reactionary and antisocial initiatives with the PP and to trust that it will never make Feijóo president as long as Vox exists is to ignore the Catalan media ecosystem and its enormous capacity to whiten any convergent position,” said the parliamentary spokesperson. of Esquerra.
To all this we must add another divorce. Relations between the PNV and Podemos have gone to the level of personal confrontation. Belarra told Aitor Esteban on Friday that It is best that you “give up your seat” to Josu Jon Imaz, CEO of Repsol since 2014, because all he does is defend the interests of the oil company. He had previously called the PNV and Junts “Repsol puppies.”
Aitor Esteban argues with María Jesús Montero in Congress on December 12.
Esteban got upset and went out into the hallway to attack Podemos. He said that those who threaten parliamentary stability are those who ignore that “there is no left-wing majority in Congress, and I am referring to Mrs. Belarra.” And he went further: “No matter how much Mrs. Belarra screams, things are not going to change,” he stated in a dull tone that revealed that he was nervous. And then more blows on Twitter. Esteban accused Belarra of lying, because an approved amendment of the PNV was not directed at the evictions of people without resources, but at home invasions, which are already illegal, to culminate in abbreviated procedure trials. The leader of Podemos responded by calling him a “Repsol deputy” and accusing him of criminalizing poverty: “What we are talking about is who is in charge here, whether Repsol is in charge or the interests of the people are in charge.”
There are several crossed duels in this story. The PNV is not worried about Podemos in Euskadi. The one he looks askance at is EH Bildu, who threatens his hegemonic position at the polls. Esquerra considers that her years in the Government have taken their toll until she was surpassed by Junts in the last regional elections. Sumar has not recovered since his dismal result in the European Championships and is trying to use the reduction in working hours as a boost, which in turn has led to a public confrontation between Yolanda Díaz and the Ministry of Economy. “I thought that, once Nadia Calviño had left, things were going to change but the behaviors are the same,” Díaz said. The government yard is also fine.
Podemos intends for each negotiation to be a way of demonstrating that it is the only party with a clearly left-wing message and that the Government has to earn its vote. The surveys are not being very fruitful. The latest one from the CIS has given him a certain joy by going from 3.4% to 4.1%, but the also recent ones from El País (3.1%), El Periódico (3.5%) and La Vanguardia (3 .4%) continue to place Podemos in a very secondary position. The percentages that these four polls give to Sumar are respectively 7%, 5%, 8% and 5.9%.
Luckily, the Christmas spirit arrives immediately, that is, the holidays, and all the protagonists of this story will not see each other for several weeks. These are not bad dates to reflect on what lies ahead. Everyone should know that if the only thing that unites them is that the right does not govern, it can be predicted that, with or without budgets, it is unlikely that the legislature will last another three years. And none will arrive at the polls in very good condition if the elections are brought forward.
Michael Moore and the US healthcare system
Michael Moore at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019.
After the murder of the CEO of one of the largest health insurers in the US, several media outlets tried to contact Michael Moore, author of the documentaries ‘Bowling for Columbine’ and ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’. The young man arrested for the crime, Luigi Mangione, wrote that Moore had shown the perversion of the health system. He did it in the documentary ‘Sicko’. Everyone wanted to ask him if he condemned the director’s murder. He responded to them with a text in which he remembers that he has always been a pacifist, which is why he condemned the deaths of all Iraqis and Americans after the invasion of Iraq, as well as “the 50,000 Americans who die every year at the hands of the arms industry and our politicians who do nothing to prevent it.”
“Yes, I condemn the murder and that is why I condemn the immoral, dysfunctional, vile, rapacious and bloody healthcare industry and I condemn each of the CEOs who run it and I condemn all the politicians who take their money and keep that system alive in instead of destroying it, breaking it into pieces and ending it.”
No one deserves to die, Moore says, nor should anyone die for not having health insurance to cover their most serious illnesses. They have as much right to live as a CEO.
Moore has posted his documentary ‘Sicko’ on YouTube. You can see it here.
The photo
Luigi Mangione, surrounded by police, on his way to New York.
The mayor of New York had the idea of turning into a great spectacle the arrival by helicopter of Luigi Mangione, accused of the murder of the CEO, from Pennsylvania where he had been detained. Instead of immediately putting him in a vehicle, he organized a parade for the greater glory of the cameras, in which he was also and he bragged about it in a tweetwith an impressive and unnecessary police deployment. The mayor, Eric Adams, is on trial for corruption and wanted to score points. Some reactions show that he achieved the opposite.
“This massive police parade makes this guy (Mangione) look like a hero. “It looks like a scene from ‘Con Air’ or a movie based on a comic book,” wrote a New York councilman. A Brooklyn councilman said that all that deployment cost so much How to finance a library for a year. It’s a scene that Christopher Nolan could have signed for a Batman movie.
How many people live in Spain?
There are already 48.6 million inhabitants in Spain. The INE announced it this month with the latest census data. Specifically, 48,619,695. Compared to 2023, the population has grown by 534,334 people, which represents an increase of 1.1%. The increase has been mainly due to the foreign population. Their number grew by 412,662 people. In total, inhabitants of foreign origin exceed six and a half million for the first time.
The foreign population, that is, without Spanish nationality, reaches 13.4% of the total. Stay with that percentage, because then in many surveys people think it is much higher, which on the other hand It happens in many countries.
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