He had not met the Federal Committee of the party, the highest body between congresses, for almost a year, on February 15, 2020. That is the time that the secretary general of the PSOE had not been accountable for his management to his own. This Saturday he did so with a speech in which he boasted of the work of the Government but not of the coalition with Podemos, to which he made no mention. Far from claiming his alliance, he in fact slipped several reproaches to his partner, and defended the historical role of the PSOE as a “true left.”
I don’t even wait long to launch the first unspoken reproach. After Pablo Iglesias equated the situation of Carles Puigdemont with that of Franco’s exiles and questioned, therefore, that Spain is a rule of law, Pedro Sánchez began his speech with a mention of the path taken by different republican politicians -Azaña, Negrín, Companys or Aguirre-, after the fall of Barcelona in 1939.
“The example of so many women and men who gave everything, including their lives for freedom, is the foundation on which our democracy is built, one of the 20 full democracies in the world. We have a contracted debt that implies honoring his memory, keeping the flame of his memory alive and defending the rule of law and democratic norms, the Constitution – he remarked -; It seems obvious but it is not.
Promised paradise
Sánchez, subjected to the permanent staging of the conflict by Podemos, also dedicated a good part of his speech to praising the work of the social democracy and to draw breast from its achievements. And he even boasted that he had not been carried away by the iconoclastic pressure of movements like 15-M. “We know that wealth,” he said, for example, “does not fall from the sky, that you have to create it in order to distribute it.”
“We are a party that never abandons the path of politics and persuasion for others that never lead to the promised paradise.” “We are,” he argued, “the left that does not give up when things are not as we dream.”
.
