The PP of Alberto Núñez Feijóo has taken its offensive against the Government of Pedro Sánchez in Brussels to the extreme by questioning the management of DANA, which claimed the lives of more than 200 people in Valencia. Protecting Carlos Mazón, who was out of the game in the hours before the catastrophe, and attacking Teresa Ribera is the strategy that the Spanish popular outsourced to Europe at the key moment: the socialist’s examination to join Ursula von’s cabinet der Leyen as vice president of Competition.
Once the evaluation of all the vice presidents has been postponed for now without a date – a merit that Feijóo’s PP has attributed to itself – and that the ‘Von der Leyen majority’ of PPE, socialists and liberals hangs by a thread, the delegation of The Spanish conservatives redoubled their offensive in a debate on DANA, which was held in a practically empty chamber, despite the fact that they placed the new argument to reject Pedro Sánchez’s candidate in the management of the catastrophe. “Is the competent minister precisely going to be awarded when there are still unrecovered bodies under the mud?” asked MEP Esteban González Pons.
The strategy of attrition against the Government in Europe is not new. It was inaugurated by Pablo Casado, who had his most critical moments during the pandemic, when he asked the European Commission to investigate the numbers of deaths from coronavirus in Spain. The focus was, however, on the management of European funds.
It all started in the pandemic
He tried to put the first brakes on the wheels during the negotiation of the terms of the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism, which was a lifeline for the countries hardest hit by the pandemic crisis, such as Spain and Italy. The intention of the Spanish PP was for the aid to be conditional so that the coalition of PSOE and Unidas Podemos could not comply with measures of its government program, such as labor reform. It was not successful and, in fact, a good part of the promises of the agreement signed by Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias were part of the recovery plan for which Spain has already received more than 50,000 million euros.
But the PP has dedicated all this time to sowing doubts about the management of European funds. He even forced a mission from the European Parliament, which he often managed to sell as an EU investigation. Even though it was a completely politicized body and controlled by one of its own, that delegation did not find any indication of infringement.
It passed without pain or glory after months of noise and accusations, at the very least, of lack of transparency in management. But suspicions about the misuse of funds were a constant and Casado went so far as to say that there was a warning for excessive public spending that was non-existent, as amended by the European Commission itself.
The Judiciary and the amnesty
Another of the fights, already with Feijóo at the head of the PP, had to do with the pension reform, questioning whether the Government was going to meet this milestone of the recovery plan. The popular ones suffered a new setback. Finally, this reform went ahead. But Feijóo questioned this pact with the community government in Brussels and assured that the reform that set fire to the streets of France was better.
But the great battle of the PP has been to question the situation of the rule of law in Spain. In this case, he used the platform of the European Parliament, which is often distorted from Madrid and loses sight of the fact that it is a politicized institution in which the EPP has allied itself with the extreme right on numerous occasions. “The problem with the rule of law in Spain is its Government,” was the message left by the popular Spanish delegation in one of the debates in which Vox assured that it was the “worst in history” placing it, therefore, behind in democratic terms of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.
In the European Parliament they are accustomed to the Spanishization of debates. In the middle of the electoral pre-campaign, one was held on the ‘Koldo case’. But the real headache in Brussels was the reform of the Judiciary that the PP blocked for almost five years, despite the fact that it was one of the warnings of the European Commission in its reports on the situation of the rule of law in Spain.
Finally, Feijóo’s PP demanded unprecedented mediation from the European Commission, which served as a parapet when it came to reaching an agreement after having blown up the bridges on two occasions with the agreement already made. The party, through Esteban González Pons, had maneuvered with the Commissioner of Justice, Didier Reynders, before one of his visits to Spain to unblock the CGPJ.
An unprecedented crisis
Even so, the Government accepted mediation and, after several obstacles put in place by the PP, which put what had been its proposal at risk, an agreement was reached to renew the governing body of the judges.
One of the excuses that the PP gave for refusing to negotiate the renewal of the CGPJ was the approval of the amnesty for the independence leaders. And they have also used that theme, so far with little success, in Brussels. PP and Ciudadanos even sent a letter to the EU ambassadors to warn them of the “democratic degradation” in Spain.
The use, specifically, of the European Parliament to attack Sánchez has been a constant: coronavirus, Koldo case, negotiation with the independentists, and a long etcetera in the newspaper archive. And now the popular ones are going one step further by wearing down Ribera even if that means blowing up the majority that traditionally operates in the EU alongside socialists and liberals and leading to a political crisis of unknown consequences.
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