He boasts of accentuating Sánchez’s weakness and the quarrels with his partners, in front of a Vox that already refers to Feijóo as “the seized right”
The PP’s 88 seats in Congress are not enough to raise a dam against the Government’s action if it manages to get the polyphony of partners who made up the majority of the investiture to sing along with it; or even if he relies on occasional soloists such as Ciudadanos, as happened in some specific votes during the state of pandemic alarm. But the scenario changes when keeping the choir of his allies tuned in has become a daily headache for Pedro Sánchez who threatens to become entrenched.
That is the playing field – that of an Executive that is still standing and with no immediate exit horizon, but that is barely holding on more and more – in which Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s PP has decided to maneuver with its tricks, convinced of that the legislature is moribund awaiting the death certificate. “Bolaños sweats ink”, ironically in Genoa, alluding to the troubles of the Minister of the Presidency who is entrusted with the most delicate negotiations, handcuffed by a voting calculator as unpredictable as it is varied.
The popular have interpreted the political crisis unleashed within the Council of Ministers and between it and the Esquerra Republicana as a result of the ‘Pegasus case’ as a window of opportunity not to wait idly for the woodworm to act alone, consuming the Government, but to feed it with the purpose of accelerating the end of Sánchez’s mandate, of which there is still a long and uncertain year and a half. In one month, the main opposition party has come to the rescue of a divided government – that is, to the aid of the PSOE – by preventing the parliamentary investigation commission for the extensive espionage to “the sewers of the State”; by guaranteeing the processing of the national security law; and, lastly, by saving the audiovisual law.
“Trap abstention”
The popular ones boast of being able to display an influence superior to that granted by “parliamentary arithmetic” of their 88 seats. And that now what they want prospers in Congress and what they reject does not; Proof of this, they insist, is that they vetoed the commission for Pegasus but forced Sánchez’s appearance this Thursday so that he had to give explanations.
In the almost two months that have passed since Feijóo, recently enthroned to lead the party, met with the Prime Minister in Moncloa, the PP has combined the attenuation of the noise of the ‘Casado era’ with the offer, covered in institutional, of an alternative anti-crisis pact to that of the Executive and with the guerrilla war in Congress. On Thursday, before an acceptable audiovisual law for them, the popular ones opted for the vote with their “trap abstention.” Or what is the same, an abstention not intended to rescue Sánchez, but to “make his life more complicated” by having to resort to a PP whom he “insults” while “the relationship with his partners is stressed.”
Feijóo’s team is convinced that this strategy is the most consistent with the leader’s trajectory and more successful in establishing the idea of changing the cycle than remaining in the trenches. But it also carries a risk: that it may penetrate part of the published opinion and the electorate that this PP is lukewarm with a government that is presented in decomposition; what Vox already disqualifies as “the seized right”. For now, Feijóo has warned that it is over throwing life preservers ‘in extremis’ to Sanchez so that he passes the ballot while the Socialists do not get off directing him and his nicknames as “mugs.” What leaves in the air the negotiation on the public pension fund of Minister Escrivá and the future CNI law announced by the president, which the popular see as a mere smokescreen.
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