Every time Alberto Núñez Feijóo says that he will always tell the truth, God kills a kitten, but first he puts it through a lie detector. On the last day of the campaign, he reiterated it in an interview published in El Mundo. “The Spanish, if they elect me, they will never choose me to lie to them. On the contrary, I am going to tell you the truth, even if it is harsh, ”she said. That same morning, he had been forced in spite of himself to continue pulling the thread of the story about which he never wanted to tell everything, the one according to which he did not know what Marcial Dorado was doing during the years of their friendship, because “before there was no Internet or Google.”
Feijóo admitted at Cope that he could say something without consulting the search engine: “When I met him he had been a smuggler, never a drug trafficker.” He was the leader of one of the three most important criminal organizations in Galicia dedicated to smuggling. Little for Feijóo, as well as for the Galician PP at the time when he enjoyed the generosity of those criminal clans. Dorado was convicted years later for laundering drug funds.
The final week has not been what Feijóo had dreamed of. Undressed by Silvia Intxaurrondo’s questions on TVE, he had to close one of his most frequent lies, used in the face-to-face with Pedro Sánchez, that the Rajoy Government had revalued pensions to match the CPI. They had already pointed out to him before that it was not true, but his advisers thought that he could stretch the hoax until the end of the campaign. Big mistake.
His relationship with the facts also ends up distorting the smallest details. To respond to the accusations after the debate with Sánchez, she said that she had eleven pages with the lies of the socialist candidate. A few days later, at the Zaragoza meeting, that number of pages magically jumped to eighteen. Each interview or speech by Feijóo is a leap into the unknown.
In the appointment with El Mundo, he explained that his great objective is to “restore harmony among the Spanish people.” No, if they are Catalan. He will do so by changing the law to ensure conservative control of the CGPJ through a majority vote of the judges. He will initiate the repeal of the main laws approved in this legislature. He will once again apply the heavy-handed policy against the Catalan separatists, which will increase the confrontation to the levels at which ERC and especially Junts have always felt comfortable.
It is a new opportunity for the indepes, depressed by the rupture between the two parties that no longer even support each other enough to be part of the same government.
Santiago Abascal is already excited by the smell of napalm. A few days ago, he predicted that “worse tensions” were coming for Catalonia than in 2017. For him, they would be much better.
With the intention of distancing voters from the idea of a PP-Vox pact, the only one that could guarantee him a majority in Congress, Feijóo insisted on Thursday on demanding the socialist abstention in the investiture: “If the PP gets more votes than the PSOE and Sumar together, I think the PSOE should facilitate the investiture of the PP.”
This would work like this: the PSOE allows Feijóo to become president and then the PP agrees with Vox in Congress to blow up all the laws promoted by the Sánchez government. An exciting offer for socialists.
Feijóo goes even further and bets on causing an internal fire in his great rival, always within harmony, of course. He has decided that it would be convenient for him to choose the future leader of the PSOE himself. “If Emiliano García-Page were secretary general, he would not be so incisive asking me if it is possible that the PSOE would abstain,” he commented.
“We are not going to entrust our political autonomy to the interests of any other political party,” Page had said a few days earlier. He must measure his words if he doesn’t want to end up like Susana Díaz and be defeated in a socialist primary by the first one that passes by.
Is Feijóo desperate or is it just that in the last days of the campaign you have to shoot all possible arrows in the hope that one ends up on the target? “We voted for Felipe in 1982,” he said at his last rally just a few hours after people were able to read that, in his opinion, “it would be good for the EU if Meloni (the far-right Italian prime minister) ended up in the European People’s Party.” Felipe, Meloni, Biden, Putin, what does it matter. The point is to pretend that he will be what you want him to be.
The costume ball does not end there. What is very crazy is that at the Madrid rally on Thursday the leader of the PP asked for the vote of “those who camped out in Sol on 15M, because most of them have just been kicked out of their party.”
Wait a minute, the 15M party? Let’s see who Feijóo is talking about: “Now it turns out that our friends Echenique, Montero, and the one who wanted to be president of the Community of Madrid, Pablo Iglesias, have been thrown out of their party, they have been thrown out of their lists, they are ashamed of them”.
He ended with a direct appeal: “To those outraged, we ask for the vote.” It is strange that Díaz Ayuso, who was listening to him, did not throw a shoe at him to see if he would wake up from his delusion.
At that rally, the PP candidate was more incisive in mocking Yolanda Díaz for her “makeup”, comparing it to that of the unemployment figures. It is curious that in twenty-four hours Feijóo, Díaz Ayuso, Cayetana the Marquise with the sad look, and even the FAES coincided in laughing at the leader of Sumar, to whom they had not paid much attention until now. Had they forgotten or have they seen a last-minute tracking that has left them worried?
Feijóo still had the option this week of another statement outside the favorite’s manual to win an election. Suddenly, the candidate who accused the Government of exaggeratedly increasing deficit and debt levels, warning that the time was drawing near for Brussels to arrive with the reductions, now raises the white flag and begins to whine. “Spain cannot lower the deficit by 13,000 million in one year. It’s not possible,” he said.
In reality, economic growth has allowed this decline and even higher, as the socialist María Jesús Montero has reminded him.
Feijóo’s argument is more witty: “The European authorities who have been looking the other way for five years and allowing Spain to borrow without limit (…) have to let the new prime minister find a sliding path towards fiscal consolidation, but not an abrupt cut in it”.
The European Commission put the fiscal limits in a state of hibernation due to an event that Feijóo has forgotten – the pandemic – to allow a large increase in public spending to mitigate the impact of the confinements on economic activity. Later, he accepted that the inflation and the war in the Ukraine implied serious losses in the accounts of the governments. It’s not that they were looking the other way, but that they were looking very closely at the economic impact of a global emergency.
Now that he believes he is close to power, Feijóo wants Brussels to let him slide for that path. As if he was piloting a Golden Martial’s glider. His justification is not a pandemic that no longer exists, but his desire to eliminate taxes that affect the highest incomes. Lowering taxes and reducing debt at the same time is not the kind of fiscal stunt that the European Commission usually accepts as a viable strategy.
How long the campaign has been for Feijóo.
