The right sets fire to Parliament in the middle of the campaign

The question that the ‘number two’ of the PP, Cuca Gamarra, had written down in the control session to the Government already hinted that her speech would not differ much from that used yesterday by the leader of her party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who came to accuse Pedro Sánchez of being more generous “with the executioners than with the victims”. “When is he going to tell the truth to the Spanish?” Gamarra asked Sánchez to immediately demand that he break all his agreements with EH Bildu. “You have squandered democratic values,” the spokeswoman accused him.

The president, trained after the ‘face to face’ on Tuesday with Feijóo in the Senate, began to ask open questions to the Popular Party bench: “Would you be able to repeat that [el expresidente] Zapatero betrayed the dead? A “yes” spread through the bench of the entire right. “Would they be able to say that Rubalcaba was an accomplice of ETA?” He said of the late Socialist Interior Minister. The affirmative shouts lowered their tone on this second occasion. And Sánchez launched a third question that no longer received an answer: “Would they be able, as Rajoy said, to say again that they have the moral conviction that ETA was behind the 11M attacks?”

It didn’t matter much, because the inertia of Gamarra’s first intervention had taken on a life of its own and almost the entire session was already marked by the theme of the last few days. The PP deputy Carlos Rojas took advantage of a question about public supermarkets to the Minister of Economic Affairs, Nadia Calviño, to talk about ETA. The Vox spokesman, Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, had a question about the government’s economic policy, but he started his intervention by asking for the illegalization of EH Bildu almost at the same time that the PP officially declared it impossible to do so. And from Ciudadanos Edmundo Bal, who had planned to speak about the housing law, also ended up recalling the Government’s pacts with the Basque independentistas.

All the questions from the right in the control session, except one from the PP on Social Security, have made references to the terrorist group.

But there was still one more chapter. The Basque separatists defended a parliamentary initiative on fiscal rules, which their spokesman, Oskar Matute, took advantage of to recount the pacts that, they say, the PP offered them in 2015 in Euskadi in exchange for making Javier Maroto, now a senator, mayor of Vitoria. Minutes later, the deputy of the extreme right Teresa López, who began her debate on the spending limits of the European Union, affirmed that her party “does not legitimize terrorists.”

The deputy continued talking about the terrorist group and not about fiscal rules. He said that the Government had “trampled on the memory, honor and memory of the victims” and reaffirmed, as his party usually does, that ETA “is in the institutions”, despite the fact that the gang laid down its weapons in 2011 and dissolved more than five years ago. The third deputy secretary of the Table, Gloria Elizo, who was holding the Presidency at that time, called the question up to three times that the Vox deputy ignored. “I’m in the question,” she repeated.

Until the president took the floor from him and after a couple of minutes speaking with a closed microphone, he returned to his seat, where his colleagues began to applaud. The ovation lasted for a few minutes, without the next speaker, from the PP, being able to start her speech. “Your Honor, this House is not a circus, really, have some respect for this House,” Elizo asked after several unsuccessful attempts to get the far-right deputies to stop the umpteenth provocation that they are leading in this legislature.

Extend the framework until after 28M

The PP’s strategy has not only filled Congress with hyperbole. In the Senate, a chamber that is usually far from the spotlight, the right-wing has also fanned the smoldering embers of terrorism. Although references to ETA and the pacts with EH Bildu are more or less common, especially in debates on social policies where the right moves with more difficulties, this week they have been used to the full.

First it was Feijóo in a control session in which Pedro Sánchez made ugly his parliamentary agreements with EH Bildu, ordered him not to reissue them after the imminent elections (with Navarra and Pamplona in the lead) and demanded that he modify the law to be able to outlaw to the Basque coalition. Sánchez ignored the frame and responded as usual, to the attack.

On Wednesday the Prosecutor’s Office of the National Court deflated the balloon of illegalization, which the Constitutional had already rejected in 2011. In the PP they assume that it is unfeasible with the current wording of the electoral law and the party law, but they already suspect a amendment to “require a plus of ineligibility to certain people.” Beyond a modification of a complex fit within the EU, the PP has made clear its intention to take the ETA issue beyond 28M.

The objective is to dominate the general election campaign with a discourse that a large part of the PP leadership did not share just a few days ago, when the PP of Isabel Díaz Ayuso and her unelected right-hand man, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, came to the Basque Country to question its democratic quality. Cabinet director a few days ago. The Madrid president will do so this Saturday.

If Feijóo was satisfied with the resignation of the seven convicted of blood crimes, Ayuso amended his plan in a few minutes. And he forced the entire PP to turn. Even the one who refused to comment on Rodríguez’s words a week ago, Borja Sémper, ended up this Wednesday contradicting himself: from defending the integration of EH Bildu into democracy, to saying that “it is not comparable” and that “while Sánchez was on the Council of Caja Madrid”, they risked “their lives to defeat ETA”.

But the zenith occurred during the debate prior to the final vote on the state housing law, the first to be approved in Spain. One of the leaders closest to Feijóo, Pedro Rollán, defended the position of the PP. His intervention will remain forever in the Sessions Journal of the Upper House: “The foundations of this law are raised on the ashes of the Hipercor shopping center, with 21 deaths, four of them children; on the rubble of the Plaza de la República Dominicana, where 12 civil guards were assassinated; on the twisted iron of the Zaragoza barracks where 11 people were killed.”

This time the medal was put on by the PP. Vox senator María José Rodríguez, who twice took the podium to defend the veto of the entire norm and voted against, went through the issue without making a single reference to terrorism.

In the PP they are happy because, according to what they say, the continuous polls that they carry out throughout the campaign indicate a rebound in their vote estimate in the heat of the non-existent terrorism of ETA. Vox, for its part, remains stable, always according to these ‘tracking’. And if the PP grows and Vox is maintained, the conclusion is that the PSOE falls.

Thus, the strategists of the PP have already planned to extend this issue until the general elections. To begin with, and already after 28M, a proposal will be voted in Congress that urges the coalition government not only to break with EH Bildu at the state level, but to “not promote pacts, nor establish any type of governance agreements or of any other type, with political parties that they have in their structures or that they have included in their candidacies for any electoral process”.

Beyond the rarity of demanding from a coalition Executive something that corresponds to the parties, it is clear that the PP and Vox want ETA in the political debate.