Corruption, contempt and the boa constrictor
The floodgates of political contempt have long been open in Spain, and the water of mutual contempt between the opposition and the government is at a record level. The worst thing is not that they mutually detest each other and permanently show it, but the effects this has on public opinion which will one day go to vote.
The atmosphere in Madrid is unbreathable and the analysis of the situation is mostly done from the trenches. When political fencing becomes a clubbing duel, not only institutional respect is degraded but also the debate within public opinion inspired by its political leaders. The paradigmatic example is the verbal and political violence that the US has experienced in recent years with the transition from Obama and Biden to Trump.
The good, the bad, those who manipulate from justice, those who administer it blindly. Those who are willing to use the system to violate it.
The result is a deterioration of institutions reminiscent of the advent of populist regimes where anything is acceptable if done by your side and the rules of the game that were previously shared disappear.
Under normal circumstances, Pedro Sánchez would have submitted to a vote of confidence some time ago, or a motion of no confidence would have been presented. Even more so after a majority in Congress asked Sánchez to step down this week. But the socialist leader has reasons to believe he will end up before the courts and is resisting in Moncloa. For his part, Feijóo knows he is incapable of winning a motion of no confidence. He would not win it with votes, nor would he win it politically even if he lost it in votes. The PP impatiently waits for the fruit to ripen and fall from the tree because it knows that its leader would not have a guaranteed victory against a political animal like Pedro Sánchez. Meanwhile, Santiago Abascal is suffocating him.
The socialists met this weekend to rally around a leader who has made a tailor-made party for himself in which there is no longer barons that Emiliano García-Page's voice be heard beyond Castilian-La Mancha. Sending ministers to crash electorally in the autonomous communities and with trusted people in leadership, everything is in Sánchez's hands. Everything? Except Felipe González, a caricature who doesn't even remember when he accompanied his Minister of the Interior to prison, convicted of a GAL kidnapping.
The PSOE has met in a kind of collective therapy to move forward in a period that promises to be agonizing beyond any potential coup de théâtre like a government crisis. The socialists have more than a dozen open cases that will evolve in the coming months. After the sentence of former minister Ábalos, the future is marked, above all, by the favorable exit of the corrupt businessman Víctor de Aldama, who urges those investigated to collaborate with justice by denouncing their co-conspirators in the Zapatero, Leire, Cerdán, Ábalos cases and any that may arise.
At the federal committee, as if nothing had happened. One message: resistance without discrepancies.
PP and Junts
The PP is not presenting the motion of no confidence because it does not have partners to win it, but a small crack has opened in the wall between the PP and Junts. The spokesperson in Congress, Miriam Nogueras, is balancing to distance herself from the socialists without getting too close to a PP that has treated them as terrorists and will have to retract their words. In fact, the Secretary General of the PP, Miguel Tellado, is already openly talking about what unites them in economic policy, while in Barcelona, at the congress of the Catalan PP, Alejandro Fernández maintains a hard line with Puigdemont's party. The Catalan PP will not take long to receive a correction from the leadership when the elections force them to understand each other to add up in Congress. Once again, despite Fernández's current moratorium with Feijóo, the Catalan PP will have to force itself and adapt to the policy historically set by Génova street. Not even Josep Piqué survived the homogenizing orders of popular policy. The leader of the Catalan PP predicted to Feijóo, at the party's congress in Barcelona, that Catalonia will be the one to mark the popular victory in the general elections. If this happens, he will be the first victim the next day, when Génova rectifies its policy with Junts to embrace someone else who is not just a Vox turned into a boa constrictor.
