Feijóo clings to ETA

Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s PP had everything going for it. The polls, the climate of opinion, and a leader who presumes to be a manager in the midst of soaring inflation (in Spain and throughout Europe). But he has failed in his first big chance to establish himself as an “alternative” to the coalition government, and not as just another opposition party. Pedro Sánchez arrived at the week of the debate on the state of the nation in one of his worst moments, and that is saying a lot in a legislature that started with a global pandemic and is now dealing with a war in Europe. With inflation above 10%, rising mortgages, runaway energy prices, internal problems due to immigration policy and plans by the socialist wing to increase defense spending, the leader of the right has opted for throw himself into the arms of ideological identitarianism, with ETA in the figurehead, and lower the economic profile that, despite some serious errors, had catapulted him in the polls.

Feijóo’s turn did not begin with the speech of his number two, Cuca Gamarra, who dedicated a third of her reply to the President of the Government to a terrorist organization that laid down its arms almost eleven years ago. Since the previous week, a social mood against the Government began to be instigated on account of the official tribute for the 25th anniversary of the murder of Miguel Ángel Blanco and the intervention of his sister, Marimar Blanco, current PP deputy in the Assembly of Madrid.

The PP organized its own act on Saturday in Ermua. With replicas in many municipalities throughout Spain, Feijóo and the former Prime Minister José María Aznar attended, under whose mandate the councilor was kidnapped, blackmailed and murdered. Aznar did not attend, 24 hours later, the official, who would have the presence of Felipe VI and Pedro Sánchez.

On Tuesday, after a speech in which Sánchez made several in-depth announcements and evidenced an attempt to reconcile with the progressive and multinational majority that gave him the investiture, including his government partner, United We Can, the general secretary of the PP started his reply with a memory to Miguel Ángel Blanco. The councilor was assassinated by ETA in 1997, on the same day and at the same time that Gamarra went up to the Congress platform. The spokeswoman demanded a minute of silence in the Plenary itself, which was not planned because the PP did not take it to the Congress bodies where the sessions are planned. Despite this, all the deputies stood up. All. In the guest gallery there were those who called the list, but could not foul anyone.

But Gamarra did not stop there. For several minutes, up to a third of the time he had available, he braided a speech with a tone and background that he would not have been out of tune 10, 15 or 20 years ago, when ETA extorted, kidnapped and killed. The plot line led inexorably to two theses. First, EH Bildu is heir to ETA, despite the fact that there are parties in the coalition that took a stand against violence when doing so could cost their lives. Second, the Democratic Memory has nothing to do with Francoism and its victims, but with those of ETA terrorism.

“Democratic memory is remembering that Miguel Ángel Blanco does not rest on the land where he was born,” said Gamarra, who concluded in an attack by elevating the Executive: “The spirit of civic rebellion has placed us in front of his Government since he chose the pact of the unworthy.”

Feijóo’s PP has taken 100 days to reach the place where Pablo Casado’s PP was, who in January 2020 already branded the coalition government “illegitimate”. Feijóo, who spent almost four years denying the fund and, above all, the ways of his predecessor, who promised to focus his opposition work on “management” and on things that “care for citizens.” Outside Congress and right-wing performances, ETA has disappeared from the concerns of the Spanish. In October 2021, the 91% of Spaniards considered positive or very positive the end of ETA. No poll places the band among the main concerns of society, enough to dedicate most of the most relevant parliamentary debate of the year to it.

The rest of Gamarra’s speech did focus on other issues, but the hyperbole of his start overshadowed everything. The slight response to Sánchez’s announcements barely shone. The PP did not have the waist to correct the strategy after the president’s coup de force. Or he didn’t want to. The next day, not a few leaders made an effort to justify the strategy that their general secretary had led. The murder of Miguel Ángel Blanco was a very hard blow for the whole of Spanish society, but especially for the party. “You have to understand the internal dynamics,” explained some of the people who accompanied Feijóo to the opening of the summer course in San Lorenzo del Escorial (Madrid) organized by the European delegation of the PP. “At that same time, 25 years before, they shot him twice in the neck. The president could have remembered in the morning,” reproached another high command.

The next day, Feijóo no longer spoke of ETA or terrorism. He focused on reiterating his economic prescriptions and even disguised himself as a progressive to reply, 24 hours late, to Sánchez’s speech. It seemed that, indeed, what happened on Tuesday had been a one-off event, more or less skillful, but understandable.

But then a detail had not yet transpired that, at least, casts doubt on this story. According to various media reports, at one o’clock in the afternoon on Tuesday, the PP’s Secretary of the Interior, Ana Vázquez Blanco, one of the party’s most strident deputies, sent twenty mobile messages to as many associations of victims of the terrorism to summon them urgently to a meeting in Congress with the president of the party.

The appointment was going to be held just 48 hours later, the same day that the resolutions of the debate were going to be voted on, as well as important laws for the Executive: the second anti-crisis decree law, the reform of the law of the Judiciary to unblock the Constitutional Court and the Democratic Memory Law. The reason given was the memory of the Spirit of Ermua. But that same morning Feijóo himself assured in an interview on Telecinco: “What do we explain to these people? Are these people really going to give the go-ahead to this law of democratic forgetfulness? Do we explain to these people that Bildu, co-author of the law, does not even condemn the murders of his relatives? That’s not how you build, you destroy.”

In case it was not clear, in the press release distributed by the PP after the meeting, which was held in Congress despite the fact that Feijóo is a senator, it was reiterated: “This meeting also takes place on the day that the in Congress the Law of Democratic Memory, agreed between the Government and Bildu, formation that continues without condemning terrorism”.

The urgency of the call, and the coincidence with the vote on the law, put several organizations on alert. In fact, some of the most important, both in terms of the number of associates and the presence and activism of their members, did not attend. Covite, for example, whose president is Consuelo Ordóñez –whom elDiario.es interviews this Saturday–, sister of the former deputy mayor of San Sebastián and a reference for the PP, Gregorio Ordóñez, assassinated by ETA. Or the Victims of Terrorism Foundation, whose patronage includes Ángeles Pedraza (former president of the AVT and whom Isabel Díaz Ayuso appointed as manager of 112), Francisco Tomás y Valiente or Gorka Landaburu, among many others. The Foundation in fact represents different organizations and brings together thousands of members.

Nor does the Buesa Foundation, in memory of Fernando Buesa, PSE leader who died at the hands of terrorists. Or the 11M Association, the largest of those that represent the victims of the Madrid train attack in March 2004.

They were not the only ones who denounced a political use of the victims by the PP. The daughter of Ernest Lluch, Rosa Lluch, or that of Juan Mari Jauregui, Mari Jauregi, thanked the words of the parliamentary spokesperson for EH Bildu, Mertxe Aizpurua, on Wednesday from the rostrum of Congress, and demanded “respect” for Cuca Gamarra.

The disunity of the victims was evident. This is how they reported it themselves. And the impact on the development of the debate on the state of the nation, very slight. No one doubts that Sánchez won, by far, the stake. The week has also ended with the return of ERC to the parliamentary majority that supports the Government and has closed with a meeting between the chief executive and the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonés, who have agreed to resume the bilateral dialogue to try to rebuild relations after the bankruptcy that occurred in the midst of the independence process.

And while all this was happening, Feijóo returned on Friday to the summer university organized by the Complutense University in the Madrid mountains. Far from reorienting the week’s speech, Feijóo insisted: “Bildu is what it is, without nuance. They are the heirs of a terrorist group. It cannot be legitimized from a parliamentary point of view.” The leader of the PP, who presumes to be moderate and a good manager, fueled the theory of an “authoritarian drift in the institutional sphere” that Sánchez is leading. “All the laws that are approved in Spain come out because ERC and Bildu say Yes“, he continued, to attack the “badly called Democratic Memory Law” that the PP has renamed billu law. Feijóo regretted that Sánchez agrees “with the political heirs of those who bombed democracy.” “They don’t deserve it” because, he assured, “they killed more than ever during the Franco regime” (sic).

By then, part of the victims of ETA had already demanded that the PP not “confront” those who had suffered Franco’s repression with those who were hit by terrorism. With the organization of Consuelo Ordóñez at the head. Covite wrote on Twitter: “We defend that all victims have the right to memory, justice, truth and reparation. It is unacceptable to confront the memory of the victims of terrorism with those of the civil war or Francoism. All Victims deserve DIGNITY and RESPECT.”

The words of Ordóñez and his organization have been fatal in Genoa, according to Feijóo’s reaction. On Friday, at the question of the journalists, the PP leader publicly reprimanded Gregorio Ordóñez’s sister. “She’s wrong,” she said. “She has little information,” she added, despite being president of Covite and the person who directly received the wassap of his Secretary of the Interior. Feijóo concluded: “Goyo Ordóñez’s wife said that she could not come because she had Covid and she was grateful for the call. If the woman proves that she would like to come, she should not bother any family member.”

Quite a novelty in the PP. No one had dared until now to respond in this way to a victim who, certainly, has been very critical of the party in which her brother was a member in recent years. Consuelo Ordóñez, who is not in the habit of keeping what she thinks, answered immediately

The end of the week that looked the worst for Sánchez and Feijóo had the most face has ended like this with a trademark twist of the Moncloa resident’s house. A plot twist that grants a few months of extension to the president, who will have to do to fulfill the expectations that he has raised in the society most affected by inflation. And that leaves the leader of the PP in a complex confrontation with victims of ETA, whose representation has been arrogated precisely since the murder of Miguel Ángel Blanco and without many opportunities provided to recover the initiative until the political course restarts in September. Then there will be eight months left for the municipal and regional elections.

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