Why Felipe González is no longer a member of the PSOE

BarcelonaBefore the sentence was made public, Felipe González had already taken it upon himself to call it "garbage," "political corruption," and "barrabassada." And with all solemnity, he announced that he would not vote for the PSOE if Pedro Sánchez is the candidate, nor as long as it is led by someone who participated in the amnesty. This is the latest episode in a long-standing estrangement, which began, in fact, in the Zapatero era. His tragedy is that he cannot even approach the PP, the party to which he is undoubtedly closest today, without losing the little credit he retains and betraying his biography.

González, like Alfonso Guerra and others, represents a PSOE that is now clearly a minority. It is a Jacobin and Spanish nationalist PSOE, without a doubt, and one that agrees with the PP on one central aspect: the 1978 Constitution cannot be perfected and the Transition is untouchable. But the Socialists began to question the Transition some time ago. The first to do so openly was José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who, we recall, won the party's general secretary position by a handful of votes over Felipe González's candidate, José Bono.

González was always critical of Zapatero, and especially of his historical memory law, which questioned the narrative that the Transition had brought about total reconciliation between the two sides in the Civil War. Zapatero has always explained that the reason he entered politics was the legacy of his grandfather, Juan Rodríguez, a captain in the Republican army shot by Franco's regime in 1936. The idea that the mass graves of the war should be opened and the bodies identified (the vast majority of whom were Republican victims who had not been exhumed) was considered to be that of the Transition and the amnesia it had entailed.

Zapatero's republican rhetoric infuriated González, who in 2012 supported Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba over the Catalan Carme Chacón (whom he saw as too federalist), and in 2014 did not publicly weigh in on the issue of Eduardo Madina, who always played the modest card, and Pedro Sánchez, the candidate sponsored by the barons to save the seat for Susana Díaz, who had just arrived at the Andalusian Regional Government. He later confessed that he had voted for the former. Evidently, González was behind the operation to oust Sánchez in 2017, when he refused to invest Mariano Rajoy and opened the door to a pact with Podemos. At the time, he accused him of being a liar and supported Díaz, but lost by a landslide. It was the first time that the party members turned their backs on him in a significant way. However, in 2021, he still took a photo with Sánchez at the party congress to project an image of unity. But with the amnesty, announced for 2023, the rupture is now complete.

And González, in particular, now dreams of a PSOE led by Madina, one that commits to broad agreements with the PP and breaks with the left and the nationalists. But that anti-Sanchista PSOE will not return. The party members see Felipe as a traitor, as someone who lives like a tycoon and no longer represents them. And he may not know it yet, but he is no longer a member of the PSOE.