Antoni Bassas' analysis: "Sánchez saves his job, but loses face."
The measures announced today are correct. But for Sánchez, who took office when the PP's corruption was unbearable, these measures come too late and do not alleviate his responsibility for the lack of control imposed by Ábalos and Cerdán.
Today is the day. Pedro Sánchez began the session at nine in the morning and delivered a three-quarter-hour speech. As expected, he presented an ambitious plan to combat corruption in public procurement. He says he has reached an agreement with the OECD and has borrowed ideas from several political parties, especially Sumar. What measures does the plan incorporate? Well, the imaginable ones: an anti-fraud agency, transparency, compliance, random checks on politicians' assets, protection for whistleblowers who report corruption cases, creation of specialized courts, a 20-year ban on public contracts for companies convicted of corruption, and the recovery of stolen assets, including preventive confiscation of stolen property without waiting for a court conviction.
The measures seem obvious. But how did he express all this? Has he considered resigning and calling elections? Here's a 49-second summary:
"Today I come to assume my responsibility and propose measures to prevent this from happening again," "I am a clean politician from an exemplary party", believing that Cerdán was "a humble person was my mistake", "I was wrong", "I aspire to regain the trust of my investiture partners"... He even recalled the PSOE's commitment to abolishing prostitution. When he finished his first speech, Yolanda Díaz also applauded him.
The PP let him speak, practically not interrupting him. They let Sánchez hang himself by his own rope so that Feijóo has made a very tough intervention, from the first sentence:
"You can't hide it; there's no amount of makeup that can hide the fact that you're a ruined politician. You're putting on a show like a slaughtered lamb. You're where you are because you've proven yourself a fraud. And what's killing you is that now everyone knows. I've always said this term was born from a corrupt transaction. From everything. From your arrival at the Socialist Party with primaries that you apparently falsified, from the vote of no confidence that you bought, and from your government that you stole."
Feijóo has been harsh on Sánchez and the parties that refuse to let him fall. He blew up a bridge (if there was one left) with the PNV (Basque Nationalist Party), when he asked them if "they live on subsidies?" And he hammered home the point: "Whoever has seen them and whoever sees them."
Sánchez is considering holding out until August and then continuing until September because, as the day goes by, the year goes by. We're back where we were: the measures announced today are correct. But for Sánchez, who came to power when the PP's corruption was unbearable, these measures come too late and don't dispel his responsibility for the chaos of Ábalos and Cerdán.
Good morning.
