Feijóo enters a framework of weakness inside and outside the PP

“The Constitution must be fulfilled from beginning to end. From the first to the last of your articles. Everyday of the year. Whether you are in government or in opposition. That political parties fail to comply without shame is the defeat of moderation and the triumph of extremism. It is not our case. The defense and full compliance with the Constitution is our obligation and also our choice.”

This Saturday in Seville, the President of the Government, together with Felipe González and 4,000 other socialists, celebrated the 40th anniversary of the historic electoral victory of the PSOE in 1982, and he could not avoid the temptation of carrying out Alberto Nuñez Feijóo’s decision to break the negotiation to unlock the renewal of the Judiciary. He knows that this time he is moving within a winning framework because in politics, sometimes, what it seems is. And this is one of them.

Renewing the Council of the Judiciary is not an option, but a constitutional obligation that must be fulfilled. Yes or yes. There are no excuses, although the PP has chained them for almost four years. Electing new members of the highest body of judges in a timely manner is a legal mandate, although the procedure is not liked, although the Government’s legislative agenda is disliked and although Feijóo appeals to another PSOE to reach an agreement.

By the way, that the “other PSOE” that Feijóo idolizes has responded loud and clear to his decision to torpedo the negotiation. And not just anyone has done it, but Felipe González himself. Loud and clear: “If someone does not like a law, he has the right to change it, but what he does not have the right to do is break it. First you fulfill it and then you change it. In this way, democracies are stabilized and coexistence is reinforced”. Surely González’s words did not sound new to him because the president of the PP has been listening to the advice of socialists of what he calls “moderate Spain” for some time and already at the La Toja Forum in early October he told him what idem. If his intention was to open a gap between those of then and those of now, he already knows that in this the socialists do continue to follow the same. “Without stability or coexistence, everything is light, you can fall and go back,” González stressed, alluding to the greatest institutional crisis that the Judiciary has experienced, including the resignation of the President of the Supreme Court, and whose responsibility lies with the Spanish right. .

When Feijóo considers the negotiation on the General Council of the Judiciary dead and maintains that there will only be an agreement “with another PSOE”, what he is saying is that he will maintain the blockade until after the general elections, which is a perverse way of denying the legitimacy of Sánchez, as the most reactionary right systematically does and in the Government they consider “deeply anti-democratic”.

In La Moncloa they remember that the president of the PP not only “breaks the law and the Constitution, but also intends to dictate the legislative agenda of a legitimate government and also decide who is the leader of the PSOE.” They understand, as the PP certainly understood until Thursday night when it announced the breakdown of the negotiations, that the reform of the crime of sedition and the renewal of the CGPJ were different issues that Feijóo has tried to mix to mask his lack of leadership inside and outside of the PP.

An implacable newspaper library on sedition

The newspaper library, which is always relentless, remembers not only the words of the popular spokesperson, Cuca Gamarra, this week, separating one issue from another, but also countless occasions on which, since 2018, Sánchez has stated, in parliamentary headquarters but also in public acts, his desire to homologate the crime of sedition to European legislation. And that ERC, a regular partner of the Government, had asked Sánchez to resume his commitment, they knew it even in the last corner of Génova Street, although it was never an obstacle when, after the resignation of the President of the Supreme Court, Carlos Lesmes, they decided resume the negotiation that they are now blowing up.

In the PP they insist that one thing “is knowing that the reform was going to be approved and another thing is that a few hours after the agreement is closed, a government minister makes it explicit, at the request of the ERC, in parliament.” A popular baron of the most proactive in defending the unblocking of the Judiciary explains it in another way: “We cannot be useful fools of Sánchez. It is good that we let hairs in the cat flap with a negotiation that many of our people did not understand and another is that in electoral terms we can accept that we have attended impassively to a legal reform that issued the return ticket to Spain for Puigdemont and other leaders of the procés considered fugitives from the Spanish Justice”.

On the Monday before the breakup, several PP leaders already expressed concern, in addition to the polls that considered the “Feijóo effect” dead, because of the criticism that the related media were beginning to direct at the real possibility of the agreement and that “ the PP is fooled by Sánchez”. The comments of various reference analysts for the most radical sector of the party were followed by some written press editorials and several radio comments from those who see Ayuso as the muse of the Spanish right. This is a reality assumed in the party, even among those who try to cover up the decision with a supposed “assault by Sánchez and the independence movement on Spanish institutions.” The assault they speak of is the consequence of a parliamentary majority that came out of the polls. It’s called democracy.

Be that as it may, the truth is that Ayuso asked Feijóo in the morning not to close the agreement, just at the moment when the chiefs of staff of the president of the PP and the Government closed a telephone conversation between the two that same afternoon. What is said that Bolaños said to Pons and Pons to the minister about the crime of sedition would be dismantled with mixed messages that neither party wants to make public in honor of privacy and respect for private conversations, just the one that “that did not show Feijóo by making public his crossroads with the President of the Government”, lament the Socialists. But there is written evidence, they defend in the PSOE, “of the panic that an editorial in the written press unleashed in the ranks of the PP” and that “there were too many people conspiring against the agreement.”

The fact is that La Moncloa found out through a statement sent to the media that the PP was once again blowing up the negotiation and, later, the Madrid president would be in charge of hanging the rupture medal by revealing what exactly she had told him He asked Feijóo a few hours before he decided to return his party to the starting point: to the breach of the law and the Constitution, to a project subjected to the ups and downs of the morning editorials and to a weakened national leadership inside and outside of the match. Right to the same precipice that Pablo Casado fell eight months ago now.

“Spain is just what there is outside the M-30”

He will try to ignore her [a Ayuso], but it is the history of our organization. Madrid is not Spain within Spain. In fact, Spain is what is outside the M30”, summed up a prominent leader of the previous national leadership in a conversation with elDiario.es, clearly alluding to the pressure exerted by the Madrid president and the internal weakness of Feijóo, “which is He has folded at the first opportunity”. An analysis that they have tried to dismantle from the national leadership by filtering that the president of the PP had asked several barons of the party for an opinion and that the Andalusian Juan Manuel Moreno also asked him to break. This latest version does not coincide, at all, neither with the personality of the Chairman of the Board nor with what they assure from their environment, where they indicate that “Feijóo always asks for opinions and, then, he is the one who makes the decisions”.

Who rules in the PP? It is the question that underlies all this, since it has been known that Sánchez and Feijóo had personally closed an appointment for next November 2 in which to finalize two minor issues of the agreement. If he had decided to break off the negotiation, at 6 pm on Thursday – when the telephone conversation between the two took place – the meeting would never have been scheduled for after the bridge of all saints. Nor would he have said that morning in a public act, and in relation to the reform of the crime of sedition, that when he was president of the Government he would revoke the reform and once again include the calling of illegal referenda as a crime in the Penal Code, while justified, for his parish, the agreement with Sánchez. To agree, it was already agreed, until the pact would be signed in La Moncloa and would probably be accompanied by a photo of both leaders.

This time yes, everything is as it seems. And La Moncloa has also not had to struggle in the battle for the story because what happened has also been broadcast live and direct by the protagonists of the induction to rupture. Ayuso returns by her privileges, accompanied by her friendly press and a 23,000 million budget that makes her an object of media adoration while Feijóo remains in a manifest situation of weakness inside and outside the party. The related press continues to maintain its bet on Sol’s tenant and in the PP it is once again on record that the Madrilenian can also double the pulse of Casado’s successor.