Feijóo's strategy to distance himself from the trial of the state's sewers

MadridThe day before the trial of the Kitchen case began in the National High Court, the PP already indicated that its strategy was to create a firewall. "Feijóo is not the Kitchen," party sources proclaimed. This has been the stance of the popular party throughout the first and second day of the oral hearing. The narrative that current PP leaders repeat both in public and in private is that it is an issue related to the past, which has absolutely nothing to do with Alberto Núñez Feijóo and the team of the current popular president. The person in charge of verbalizing this on Tuesday was Alicia García, spokesperson in the Senate, in a press conference focused on attacking Pedro Sánchez for the alleged corruption surrounding him. "We are talking about a case from more than ten or fifteen years ago, but today a case from fifteen minutes ago from the PSOE is being judged. And those that remain," she defended.

The start of the trial in the Supreme Court against José Luis Ábalos, Sánchez's former number three in the PSOE and former Minister of Transport, the day after the Kitchen case began, was the perfect coincidence for the PP to push this narrative. The popular party maintains that its party already paid the political consequences of cases like Kitchen or Gürtel with the 2018 motion of no confidence that brought down Mariano Rajoy's government, while the PSOE has not yet paid the price for the scandals of Ábalos or Santos Cerdán, the successor of the former Minister of Transport in the socialist organization secretary and until less than a year ago the right-hand man of the Spanish president. The popular spokesperson in the Senate has criticized that precisely "those who arrived giving lessons on corruption have ended up starring in it and are up to their necks in mud".

And the truth is that in the "Kitchen" trial, which judges the leadership of the Ministry of the Interior with Rajoy, no official from Feijóo's term is on the defendant's bench. The PP leader claims that his general secretaries have "irreproachable" track records and that no minister from his time as president of Galicia is under investigation for corruption. "We are not the same," they say in Génova to differentiate themselves from Sánchez, even though other parties, like Vox, take advantage of trials involving former officials from both sides to lump them together. The Senate is precisely where the PP seeks to focus on cases related to Sánchez and divert attention from those that compromise figures who have been key in his party, such as Rajoy —summoned as a witness in the trial— or Jorge Fernández Díaz —main defendant and suspended from membership since July 2021, but still with an open file—.

Among the moves announced by García in the upper house that respond to this objective is a new attempt to summon Cerdán's wife, Francisca Muñoz, next Thursday to one of the investigative commissions focused on Sánchez's circle —after she stood them up on Monday, citing medical reasons—. Furthermore, in the control session this Tuesday afternoon in the Senate, in which the popular spokesperson asked the new Spanish vice president, Carlos Cuerpo, who has debuted as first vice president, one of the topics was precisely Ábalos and what the PP has called "the black spring of sanchismo" —the leader's brother will also be tried before the summer—. Cuerpo avoided controversy in line with Moncloa's stance, which distances itself from the situation of the former Minister of Transport.

The judge dismisses judging the PP

In the second session of the Kitchen case trial, the court judging the ten defendants for the Interior's dirty war has given Feijóo's PP a little more breathing room by having discarded seating the party on the accused's bench as a beneficiary participant. The PSOE, which acts as the popular prosecution, had requested to suspend the trial and return to the previous instruction phase to be able to indict both the PP as a legal entity and the former general secretary María Dolores de Cospedal. The president of the court, Teresa Palacios, argued that the trial of events dating back to 2013 cannot be delayed any further. "It was about time," she stressed, thus endorsing the instruction of the controversial judge Manuel García-Castellón, now retired.