Feijóo maintains that the situation is one of “national urgency” and predicts: “This Government is going to fall”

From the way in which Alberto Núñez Feijóo expressed himself this Sunday from Córdoba, it seems that the Government of Pedro Sánchez, which took office four months ago, has a few hours or days left in La Moncloa. The leader of the PP has described the political moment with the utmost gravity, describing the situation as a “national emergency,” and has declared that the progressive Executive “is going to fall.” And he is going to do it, he has opined, “because of lies and corruption,” in reference to the amnesty law and the Koldo case. The head of the conservatives, in an event held in the Andalusian city together with the 12 popular regional presidents, has presented these regional Executives as a kind of Government in parallel to that of Sánchez, which he has disqualified as “of props”. “Spain is governed by the autonomous governments,” she has claimed.

If Sánchez’s Executive defends that the pact between the PSOE and the Catalan independence parties to approve the amnesty law launches the legislature, the PP maintains the opposite: that this agreement, together with the case of alleged corruption that has been known within of the Ministry of Transport, are going to make the Executive succumb. “This Government is going to fall, Sánchez will fall,” Feijóo predicted in his speech in Córdoba. “He will fall for reasons [por las que] has achieved the presidency: lies and corruption,” he emphasized. The PP considers that the pact between the PSOE and Junts for the investiture of Sánchez is a “corrupt transaction” because it involves amnesty to alleged criminals in exchange for their vote; and conceptually equates it to the corruption of the Koldo case.

At the same time, the leader of the PP has recognized that no one, not even the president himself, can predict the duration of Sánchez’s second term. “There are some who wonder if this legislature will be long or short,” said Feijóo. “Sanchez doesn’t know. He is the first president who does not have the ability to decide how long the legislature lasts, which will be as long as the profit his partners want to get. As long as Sánchez is useful to them, they will extend his mandate day by day. And when he is no longer useful to them, they will let him fall into ostracism and indignity.

The PP leader’s speech has been filled with references to this supposed provisional nature of the Government, such as when he said that “the PSOE no longer governs: it survives and subsists”, and that Spain “presents an unprecedented situation”, with “a president who “He abdicates, but he doesn’t leave.” Feijóo has also warned about the “political decomposition” of the Executive, thus increasing the pressure to seek an end to the cycle that Sánchez denies. The socialist spokesperson in Congress, Patxi López, anticipated a long legislature this Sunday: “Let them continue to rage, because there is a Government for a while.”

In contrast to this central government in “decomposition”, the leader of the PP has presented a kind of parallel Executive, which is made up of the 11 popular autonomous presidents plus the president of the autonomous city of Melilla and the vice president of the Canary Islands, who this Sunday signed a joint declaration with political coordination measures. The PP proposes a kind of country in two political directions: the one set by the national Government, in the hands of the left and dependent on the pro-independence parties, and the one that the regional Executives will lead in the hands of the right and the extreme right. Feijóo has confronted both models, stating that the popular leaders, unlike Sánchez, “are not going to give in to the separatist fallacy nor are they going to bow the knee to minority separatism.”

The popular leader has been so emphatic in this demand for his governments that he has come to forget that several of them are supported by agreements with the extreme right. “There is no president here who owes the presidency to anyone,” Feijóo stated, ignoring that five of his regional presidents – those of Castilla y León, Murcia, Aragón, the Valencian Community and Extremadura – govern in coalition with Vox, and another —that of the Balearic Islands— has parliamentary support from Vox. The popular leader has referred one by one to all his presidents, and in the case of the Extremaduran, María Guardiola, who resisted including the extreme right in her Government, but ended up giving in, has suffered a lapse and has called her María “Gallardo”. Gallardo is the surname of the vice president of Castilla y León, of Vox ―Juan García Gallardo―, one of the main public figures of the ultra party. Feijóo, who experienced an important tug-of-war with the Extremaduran president over the pact with Vox that she initially wanted to refuse, has described Guardiola as “a temperamental woman.”

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The 11 regional presidents of the PP, together with the president of Melilla, the vice president of the Canary Islands and a representative of Ceuta, have signed a political declaration in Córdoba, after two days of work behind closed doors, in which they have agreed to advance some joint measures . Among them, that all the PP communities will apply in this legislature, in a “progressive” manner, free schooling from zero to three years, that they will take an EBAU exam (the old Selectivity) with homogeneous criteria, which will establish a framework common schedule of vaccines and cancer prevention tests; and that they are committed to “achieving higher standards for inheritance and gift tax credits,” the document says.

In addition to Feijóo, only the president of Andalusia, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, the host in Córdoba, took part in the event, seeking to compensate the PP for the motion of censure that evicted the Government of Mariano Rajoy in 2018 due to the ruling of the Gürtel case. Moreno Bonilla has defined that motion as “invented.” “They invented a motion of censure against a legitimate government, that of Mariano Rajoy, that was boosting the economy. They invented a motion of censure because they said that the Government was corrupt. Does Mr. Sánchez want to explain to me where the corrupt Government is in Spain? What does the PSOE case?”, the Andalusian baron asked. Although the PP draws a clear parallel with the current moment due to Koldo casedoes not currently point towards the use of that parliamentary instrument, the motion of censure, with which Sánchez came to power in his first term.