Last Friday at eight thirty in the morning an urgent call arrived in the electronic mailboxes of the media. The Popular Party announced a press conference by its spokesperson in the Parliament of Galicia, Alberto Pazos Couñago, just three hours later. He did not specify reasons, just the usual “current affairs.” When Pazos Couñago finally addressed the press, he did so to uncover an unusual attack against one of the members of the Consello de Contas, the supervisory body of the Xunta, of a statutory nature and whose composition was unanimously agreed upon by the autonomous Chamber. “The desire for prominence of the councilor appointed by Galician socialism is worrying,” he said, “concerned about criticizing the Xunta in any area.”
The Consello de Contas is not the only official institution, derived from the Statute of Autonomy, that has been the target of attacks by the Galician government right in recent months. The Consello da Cultura Galega, the Superior Court of Xustiza of Galicia or even the Galician Institute of Statistics have received scoldings from PP officials, from Alfonso Rueda himself to his deputies and media terminals. A strange implicitly anti-system discourse – as long as the system does not agree with them in everything – makes its way among the popular Galicians.
The context of Pazos Couñago’s extemporaneous statements was not just any context. The Consello de Contas has been operating since 1985 and is in charge of “external control of the economic and financial activity of the public sector in the community”, that is, as stated on its own website, “of the supervision and control of public money, the valuation on its usefulness, efficiency in disposal, rationality, as well as possible information on improvements in its management.” Two of the latest reports issued by the institution were not kind to the successive PP governments in Galicia: one certified the waste in the construction of the Álvaro Cunqueiro Hospital in Vigo, 470 million euros more due to the privatization that Feijóo opted for; The other focused on the low execution of European funds in 2022, less than half of the 1.3 billion euros.
The parliamentary spokesperson for the popular party did not mention them. He chose to focus the attack on the councilor proposed by the PSdeG, whom he did not mention by name. “It is the first time in history that one of the councilors of the Contas Council tries to overshadow the senior councilor, the person who is representative and who is the one who must report on the activities of the council,” he stated. He also did not clarify what he was referring to. The person appointed by the Socialist Party, Simón Rego, had published an article in the Faro de Vigo in which he denounced the abuse of minor contracts by the Galician Government. He reiterated it in an interview on Cadena SER. But in both cases he avoided presenting himself as a representative of the body to which he also arrived with the votes of the PP and identified himself with his profession, civil administrator of the State.
“The BNG Orbit”
Only a few weeks before, the PP machinery had made an effort to attack another public institution, included in the Statute of Autonomy, and with advisory functions to the regional executives, the Consello da Cultura Galega. This body, chaired by philologist Rosario Álvarez, prepared and published a dense and harsh report on the impact of the hypothetical construction of a macrocellulose in Palas de Rei (A Ulloa, Lugo). Its 180 pages, signed by experts in different matters, concluded that the installation of the factory planned by the Portuguese company Altri would constitute “a serious fracture in the territory”, would imply many fewer jobs than those announced and would cause negative effects on the environment. The Xunta and the PP did not take it well.
If the line of argument regarding the Contas Council consisted of attacking its socialist member, this time the right opted for another of its classics: the authors of the document “are part of the orbit of the BNG.” It didn’t matter if they were prestigious university professors or professional researchers. For two PP MEPs, Francisco Millán Mon and Adrián Vázquez, they were just “supposed specialists” who were dismissed with an accusation of “no independence,” and they did so just five hours after the report was presented to the press. It could be that they had time to read it completely, but it didn’t seem that way. The general secretary of the party, also a deputy Paula Prado, joined this first salvo. And, every other weekend, Alfonso Rueda, president of the Xunta.
“I’m not going to go in because I didn’t read the report. “I read journalistic information and it is surprising that, among the activities of the Consello da Cultura Galega, this is of such importance as to be presented at a press conference,” he stated at the end of the weekly meeting of his cabinet, and when four days had passed since the publication of the text. Questioning the legitimacy of the advisory body to give an opinion on an industrial facility was another of the PP’s lines of argument, which was also used by the related press. The head of news at Radio Galega enthusiastically took on the idea and issued a militant editorial that provoked sharp criticism but also stark mockery on the networks. The fact is that the institution indicated by the popular ones has among its powers that of “advising and consulting the public powers of the autonomous community, especially the Xunta and the Parliament of Galicia.” Its concept of culture is not restrictive and is structured into six permanent sections, including one on heritage and cultural goods, another on science, technology, nature and society, or another on thought. The location chosen by Altri with the favor of the Xunta also affects the Camiño de Santiago.
Against a Superior Court judge
This new version of the PP that attacks the institutionality of the Statute of Autonomy does not leave the courts out of its firing range either. The Superior Court of Xustiza of Galicia, the body that “completes the judicial organization in the territorial scope of the autonomous community,” has stopped more than fifty wind farm projects. The laxity of the Galician Government when applying environmental legislation appears as one of the main reasons, beyond the very erratic renewable energy policy of the successive executives of the Galician right. Alfonso Rueda does not engage in self-criticism. Not the slightest. According to the Galician president, the Superior’s orders cause “a very serious and total paralysis” of the sector, and his cabinet has appealed them to the Supreme Court. That doesn’t always make him right.
The Popular Party has gone further than its leader. The wind paralysis, which actually starts with Feijóo’s questionable decisions regarding the wind plan of the bipartite Socialist Party and BNG, is due, according to the right, to the fact that a Superior Court judge was leader, between 2016 and 2020, of En Tide. “As leader of En Marea, Luís Villares tried to paralyze all industrial projects,” the Galician PP even published on networks without providing evidence of any kind. What’s more, Villares himself, magistrate of the third chamber of the Contentious-Administrative Court of the TSXG, who has not responded publicly, did ask to withdraw from any deliberation on the matter for having met with environmental groups during his time in parliamentary politics.
The official statistics questioned
Nor did the Secretary General of Linguistic Policy, Valentín García, provide much evidence or very solid arguments when last week he questioned, in parliament, the work of the Galician Statistical Institute (IGE), which depends directly on the Xunta and is directed by José Antonio Campo Andión, a man who came to office with Manuel Fraga and was recovered for the position, after the years of the bipartite government of PSdeG and BNG, by Alberto Núñez Feijóo. According to García, the fact that, after 15 years of PP in the Galician Government, the number of children between 5 and 14 years old who do not know how to speak Galician has multiplied by two is not “consistent” and “it must be taken very seriously.” caution”. The reason? That the children do not respond directly to the IGE survey, but rather “the people who are in the home at that moment” do so. The official statistical work is of no use to the popular people either if, once again, it does not agree with them in everything or endorse their policies in the terms in which the president of the Xunta usually sells them publicly.
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