MadridThe major debates in the Congress of Deputies don't provide solutions to problems, but they do have a positive effect: they give us an idea of the state of the main leaders and their parties. It's a kind of temperature check that allows us to draw conclusions about the course of political life and the general state of the system. I say this because the recent parliamentary plenary session on the European and Spanish projects In terms of defense and security, it essentially led me to the conclusion that the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, will hold out indefinitely, but without too many problems. The reason for that impression is that he seems very self-confident and capable of responding to all the attacks from the leader of the People's Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, without batting an eyelid. A political leader begins to falter when it becomes clear he's having a hard time, when we detect gestures of pain and a stricken expression. Sánchez doesn't seem to be experiencing any of that.
When Felipe González had been in government for seven years—like his current successor—he was already going to Parliament reluctantly, dragging his feet. It was certainly a different time and different circumstances, but we must conclude that we are in the presence of a leader who needs a very high temperature to ignite. He has a psychological coating that, for now, allows him to deflect the flames and projectiles thrown at him from all sides, without them managing to bring him down. I don't know how long his ability to appear immune to the siege he's under from both the left and the right will last. Perhaps one day he'll run out of steam, as seemed likely to happen a year ago, at the start of the legal proceedings against his wife, Begoña Gómez. which led him to halt his political agenda for five days, supposedly to consider a possible withdrawal. A hypothesis that didn't seem plausible to me.
I've always believed, however, that those days of suspended agendas should have been more useful for him to dedicate time to informing himself of the possible complications of the matter and to preparing the corresponding legal defense strategies. And also to try to instill confidence in his wife and support him. Since then, Sánchez has shown no signs of weakness, although rumors have spread around Madrid that he feels increasingly cornered and irritated among his collaborators in the Moncloa Palace. If so, he doesn't show it.
However, from the aforementioned parliamentary plenary session on defense and security—which became a kind of "state of the nation" or general policy debate—he emerged strong once again, albeit without providing much information and with no prospect of a budget for 2025. Most importantly, the commitment not to cut spending. The debate coincided with internal tensions that have featured his vice presidents, María Jesús Montero, Minister of Finance, and Yolanda Díaz, Minister of Labor. But even this episode, like others that have from time to time seemed to jeopardize the balance with its partners, has ended with an agreement of circumstances and without opening the serious crisis that the opposition would like to see as a prelude to the end of Sanchismo.
Feijóo suffers more
Feijóo, on the other hand, has a different character and suffers more. He is not the man who arrived in Madrid saying he would carry out a rather moderate opposition, without insults, aimed at criticizing the government and offering alternative proposals. The dynamics of the power struggle have swallowed him up, and it doesn't seem the same. Feijóo was convinced that aggressiveness was necessary, because you don't conquer the Moncloa Palace with bills, but rather by wearing down the government and opening its wounds until it bleeds dry.
It is difficult to say whether the legal proceedings against Begoña Gómez, or against the Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, will achieve their goal of presenting the PSOE as a party steeped in corruption. This is what the PP is attempting, with a greater chance of success in the case of former minister Ábalos and his confidant, Koldo. a scandalous caseIt also hurts the socialists the affair of the president's brother and the job he obtained from the Badajoz Provincial Council, well-paid and relatively easy to work with. But all of this, even with the reinforcements derived from the work of some judges, doesn't seem enough to permanently damage the PSOE's prospects. Feijóo, in any case, compiled a collection of all these cases in Congress to define Sánchez as "the champion of decomposition and decadence." There will undoubtedly be those who see it that way. But when this diagnosis is made by the PP leader, it sounds like an exaggerated description and an unfulfilled wish, unfulfilled.
Sánchez's Great Advantage
It's possible that a less rock-solid leader, less determined than Sánchez to remain indefinitely in politics, would have already gone bust, considering that in addition to the legal complications described above, he must also add the difficulty of managing a constantly boiling pot of agreements demanded by his partners. However, Sánchez's great advantage is that he has a kit of survival that has not yet failed him. This kit It is made up of, among other elements, an economic situation characterized by growth and higher employment levels than in other times, sarcastic reactions to rivals, doses of denunciations of the PP's pacts with Vox, and a support that, deep down, the partners provide to the budget to give it a minimum of stability.
Some actions and omissions of the opposition also feed the kit survival of the socialists, such as the long crisis of Carlos Mazón at the head of the Generalitat Valenciana. Witnesses of victims of the tragedy The news we've learned in recent days thanks to the proceedings being conducted by Catarroja judge Nuria Ruiz is chilling. The Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court will also be in the news for a long time. The tension between the two courts will likely increase, because it's very likely that the latter will continue to block the application of the amnesty law after the former has endorsed it. It may do so by way of a preliminary ruling before the European Court of Justice. The Seville Court's confrontation with the Constitutional Court over the Andalusian ERE case is a test, a rehearsal for what's to come.
