Thursday's political events were dominated by the imprisonment of Ábalos and Koldo, and the investiture of Pérez Llorca as president of the Valencian Generalitat. In other words, the focus was on the legal misadventures of two scoundrels (with Ábalos already putting on a show of turning against his own party if it might bring him some possible legal benefit) and on the placement of a figurehead at the head of the Valencian Council, following a pre-written script: continuity with the Maag era, environmental subservience, attacks against feminism, and against the Catalan language and culture. Pérez Llorca displayed the cold cynicism of promising that, if invested, he would apologize to the victims of the DANA storm. As secretary general of the Valencian PP since 2023—and, therefore, number two on the regional executive committee, second only to the outgoing president, Mazón—Pérez Llorca could have started apologizing on the very day of the DANA storm, but he never did. Offering a belated and inadequate apology, solely to gain something, is worse than not apologizing at all: any elementary school child knows this, yet it's still asking too much of certain figures in Spanish public life. Consider, like a tempting carrot, the Adelante Plan for the reconstruction of the Valencian Community, with a budget of 29 billion euros.
The political interest of Ábalos and Koldo boils down to the caliber of ammunition they can offer to fire at Pedro Sánchez. Bringing down Pedro Sánchez is the sole, obsessive activity to which the PP and its judicial, police, business, and media outlets dedicate themselves, so far with varying degrees of success. The PP has gone from "Everything is ETA" to "Everything is Sánchez," which has led them to construct a discourse of hate as furious as it is sterile, as delusional as it is divisive and divisive, in which even the most basic institutional decorum crumbled long ago.
In this context, Ábalos, for the moment, has served them to build what has all the appearance of being a new snowball: that of the supposed meeting "in a hamlet"between Sánchez, Cerdán, and Otegi to carry out the motion of no confidence that ousted Rajoy in 2018. In making this "accusation," Feijóo forgets that Bildu is a legal party—and without any corruption cases—with whom he can meet with whomever he wants with his head held high and without needing to hide. He labels Otegi a "terrorist": what Otegi was, if anything, is a political prisoner who served six years in jail for a conviction built on false accusations and evidence. But Feijóo reveals the source of much of the civil war-like hatred against Sánchez. They have only understood that that motion of no confidence did not succeed within any hamletbut by the unlikely understanding between a multitude of political forces and cultures that were reacting against a government entrenched in corruption and abuses of power.
