The “unity” of the PP against the “division” of the Government. It is the main plot line with which the leader of the popular party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, aspires to stay ahead of the polls so that, when the general ones arrive, scheduled for the end of 2023 or the beginning of 2024, the right wing regains the Government. The balance of the political course that is about to end is, according to Feijóo, that the party that only four months ago expelled its first president elected in primaries, Pablo Casado, from office after an unprecedented internal schism, has greater “cohesion internal” than the coalition government that has approved two Budgets and that, this Thursday, presented the new taxes on banks and large energy companies in a joint act of PSOE and United We Can.
The thesis was defended this Thursday by Feijóo in the appearance without questions to assess the course in which, after 13 years of absolute majorities, he left the Presidency of the Xunta de Galicia to move to Madrid and replace Casado. But he also raised it on Tuesday, before the National Executive Commission -the highest governing body of the PP between congresses-, in which he asked all his charges not to relax to try to continue leading the polls during the year and a half that remains until the generals .
“If we take stock we cannot ignore that this has been a very complex course for our party too because we have to recognize that we have experienced an internal crisis in the PP. But it is also true that we have been able to come out stronger, that we have done it in record time , and that citizens once again perceive a party they can trust and, most importantly, that it is the only real alternative to the Government of Spain”, defended Feijóo at the event this Thursday, which took place in the square of the old building of the Senate, and was attended by parliamentarians and PP officials from all over the country.
Faced with that “united” PP, its leader drew a government in decomposition. “Except for continuing in power, everything has been divided,” he said, mentioning the differences between the PSOE and United We Can in foreign, immigration and defense policy, the measures to deal with the crisis arising from the war in Ukraine or the laws audiovisual and housing “To take stock of the political course of this Government is to review a constant division,” he added.
Feijóo considers that Spain “does not deserve a government in permanent conflict, more concerned with the problems with its partners than with the problems of the Spanish” and that it is news, according to him, “more often because of the disagreements between ministers” than because of the agreements who adopts “Spain would need a government to advance and what it has is a lack of government that slows it down,” he remarked. For the leader of the PP, each Council of Ministers is “like a Derby two laps”: one “between Pedro Sánchez and Yolanda Díaz, the other between Yolanda Díaz and the rest of Podemos”.
“All” the ministers, according to Feijóo, have been involved in public controversies with their colleagues, and, in his opinion, there have been constant clashes between the Executive and its partners regarding the projects presented. “There hasn’t been a week that they haven’t aired their disputes,” he remarked. Along the same lines as his predecessor in office, Pablo Casado, the current leader of the PP considers that the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, with his parliamentary agreements with independentistas “has eroded” the institutions and “raises on each appointment and maneuvers the shadow of doubt of the control and discredit of each one of them”.
The president of the PP considers ERC and EH Bildu the “true leaders” of a “misgovernment in economic, social and institutional decomposition.” “Sánchez has turned Bildu into the notary of the Transition, has kept the Catalan independence movement as the guide of territorial policy and elevated Podemos to the maximum inspiration of economic policy,” he added. “The only essential, the only non-negotiable and the only invariable thing about his project is Sánchez,” he concluded.
Despite these harsh accusations, Feijóo also wanted to take advantage of his appearance to assess the political course to put on the suit of a statesman and “reach out” to that “decaying” Executive. This is the same leader of the PP who has blocked the renewal of the Judiciary since 2018 and who therefore refuses to comply with that obligation with one of the main administrations of the State included in the Constitution.
“Sánchez has the opportunity to correct it, to abandon his authoritarian drift and to amend himself in his last political term as president, returning to the path of the great agreements of the country, of the moderation and stability that Spain needs. The PP is there if he decides to move and return to the place that the PSOE should never have left,” he said, urging the socialist leader to break with United We Can.
“Wouldn’t a government without Podemos be even better for the PSOE?” he asked himself, before also recalling that as soon as he became president of the PP after ousting his predecessor, Pablo Casado, he suggested to Sánchez “the possibility of turn the course” and held out “his hand”. He now considers that the chief executive must “recover centrality” and do without “the support that has served to radicalize and divide the country.”
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