José María Aznar gave Alberto Núñez Feijóo an order yesterday in front of everyone: to get rid of Sánchez, you must only count on Spaniards. And to govern, in the future, also, only Spaniards, not the PNB, nor Junts. He said it like this:

In Madrid, Galician ambiguity doesn't pay, and that's why when Alberto Núñez Feijóo sends messages that can be interpreted as a gesture towards Junts or towards Catalonia (whether or not that is the Galician leader's intention), someone quickly reminds him that this path leads nowhere. This Wednesday, the great mastermind of the Madrid right and its spiritual guide, José María Aznar, has set Feijóo on the course he should follow. Aznar has called for a "national majority" that includes the left and the right to oust Pedro Sánchez. "This majority will be national or it will not be," he reiterated. Translated into political terms, Aznar tells Feijóo that he must forget about Junts and the PNB and, instead, look towards people like Emiliano García-Page and Jordi Sevilla, that is, the Felipe González-era PSOE. Lest there be any doubt, Isabel Díaz Ayuso has cried out against "the constant independence threat".

José María Aznar must always be listened to. Beyond the occasional strident declaration or the catchy soundbite that makes headlines, what he says usually reflects in depth the thinking of the dominant right-wing in Madrid. Not always coincident with what, by intuition, the Galician Alberto Nuñez Feijóo might think.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo has decided that if the democratic game doesn't favor him enough, the rules must be changed. If he doesn't win, the problem is the system, not him. And some of the citizens who have the right to vote recognized. He fiddlesby crossing the dangerous red line of instilling distrust and suspicion in the guarantees of the process itself. If the difficulties many residents abroad face in getting their vote from where they live are well known, now the leader of the Popular Party intends to put obstacles in the way of a specific type of Spaniards living outside state territory: the grandchildren and descendants of exiles and emigrants who were forced to leave the country, let's say, due to force majeure. Feijóo hasn't even ruffled his hair questioning the validity of a law that aims to repair in the present the consequences of the fierce repression of the war and the dictatorship. Both he and part of the PP and, of course, Vox, seem to want to continue humiliating the victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship ninety years after the "alzamiento" (which was not national at all, "national" was the Republic). As if the executions, prison, and exile of all those who committed no greater crime than defending themselves from fascism were not enough, as if the violence of the past were not enough, now it seems they want to continue perpetuating it in the present. If Franco wanted to exterminate all the elements he considered impure and subversive, and turned Spaniards who were not as he believed they should be into enemies, now the aim is to eliminate the vestiges, memories, and narrative of those who come directly from the horror and are the fruit of the barbarism that began that July of '36. Later they will say that it is the left that digs up the Civil War dead and they will complain about being considered heirs of the dictatorship, but when they attack the losers they show whose sons and grandsons they are. 

There are jokes that, besides being grotesque, are revealing. A recent example: Feijóo's claim that the party that wins the legislative elections should have a "bonus" reward in the form of receiving between 20 and 50 additional seats as a gift, which, if they had been voted for, would have been won by other parties. That is, to force an absolute majority by legal imperative, and thus save the winner from having to look for partners and make concessions.

Pedro Sánchez is not exactly preparing a "tupinada", but rather designing through "electoral engineering" a plan to win the next state elections thanks to the vote from abroad. This is the thesis defended by the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who this Tuesday wanted to place the Popular Party one step below Vox in the accusations of future electoral fraud that both parties have been fueling for some time. Feijóo, who was interviewed by the media outlet La7 Región de Murcia, thus specified his words on Monday on esRadio, where he openly criticized that the so-called "law of the clean" – a provision included in the law of democratic memory – is designed to alter the electoral roll in favor of the PSOE.

Almost all the analysis space is occupied by the noise of Spanish politics, a noise that has two fundamental emitters. The first is corruption close to the PSOE and Pedro Sánchez (Ábalos, Koldo, Cerdán), which adds a new indicted person:

Governing without depending on pacts is the great aspiration of any candidate for Moncloa. With this objective in their sights, the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has resurrected a controversial recipe that his predecessor, Pablo Casado, already put on the table: giving an extra bonus of deputies to the most voted list in the general elections. Would it be possible with a simple reform of the electoral law as the popular party proposes? All experts consulted by ARA agree emphatically that no: to be able to apply the measure, the Constitution would have to be reformed.

The PP's crusade to bring down Pedro Sánchez runs into the fact that it depends on Catalan and Basque parties for it to have real effects. In this context, Alberto Núñez Feijóo has revived one of those proposals that the popular party has in mind to end the dependence on independence movements in the Congress of Deputies and, in turn, also on Vox, to whom they are increasingly tied in more autonomies. The PP leader has proposed an electoral reform that would give the winning list a "plus" of deputies "to facilitate stability." A scenario that could have prevented Pedro Sánchez from governing this legislature in which the sum of PP and Vox fell just four deputies short of an absolute majority. This is what Feijóo defended in an interview this Monday on EsRadio, after being directly asked about ways to prevent "minority groups from being overrepresented" in the lower house.

This weekend, the PP of Catalonia held its congress, and the party leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, came and said: “Like most Catalans, we also want to turn the page”. The phrase has been interpreted as an offer to Junts so that one day it may be possible for the PP candidate for the presidency of the Spanish government to receive their votes. Junts must already know what they want to do, but it would seem that Feijóo is playing at an interested confusion: Junts voted with the PP and Vox that Sánchez had to resign, but has said in every way that he does not intend to invest Feijóo, meaning that for now Feijóo will have to wait.But it is interesting to delve into Feijóo's phrase to see what the popular candidate understands by wanting to turn the page.And the answer could not be more predictable: that Catalonia should return to the common regime autonomous path, that it should pay, that it should be silent, and if it has to do something exceptional, it should do so to offer new glories to Spain. And that's when Feijóo pulls the rabbit of the Sagrada Família out of his hat. Look at this tweet on social media:“The image of the Sagrada Família. The one the PP wants to represent”. It reminded me of what happened a few years ago, when TVE premiered Operación Triunfo and the PP said that the contest embodied their values of effort and meritocracy to achieve success. Does something work and is liked? They make it their own. Theirs, in their own way. Listen to this minute and a half of Feijóo, very revealing of the thinking he has about Catalonia:“I want to mention something that has surprised again, finally, and that we haven't seen in Catalonia for decades. It is a moment that moved millions of people, and it is none other than the extraordinary inauguration of the tower of Jesus of the Sagrada Familia with Pope Leo XIV. It was the symbol of a capable Catalonia, of a Catalonia that was thinking big again. Capable of doing extraordinary things and capable of building a collective ambition”. Look, Mr. Feijóo, I'm very glad you liked the blessing ceremony of the tallest tower of the Sagrada Família, but hire a speechwriter who doesn't mix apples and oranges. You say he's "surprised again, finally"? Finally what? "That we haven't seen Catalonia for decades"? Do you really think that Catalonia hasn't done anything good in 34 years, between the '92 Games and the inauguration the other day? Has representing 25% of Spanish exports and 20% of GDP happened on its own? Has the player that the followers of la roja pray to and who has half the world in love come up like a mushroom? Does it seem to you that wanting independence is not thinking big, that organizing a referendum to discuss it as the most democratic countries do is not characteristic of a country "capable of doing extraordinary things and capable of building a collective ambition?" Here, the one that is not capable of doing things is the State. And I'm not referring to doing extraordinary things, but ordinary ones, like getting trains to run. What is commendable, Mr. Feijóo, is that with the fiscal deficit – extraordinary, this one – that has been dragging on for decades, the Catalans, as your predecessor Rajoy used to say, do things. But please, continue. "That day we did not see one part of Catalonia impose itself on another; we did not see one part of Spain against the rest of Spain. No, what we saw was a part of Spain offering the best it has, and we want to see it again more".

"Continue to deepen the government's erosion." This is the PP's strategy in this final stretch of the legislature. Alberto Núñez Feijóo's party has deployed it over the past few weeks – marked by the judicial agenda surrounding the PSOE – activating the armed wings at their disposal against Pedro Sánchez while still resisting the step of presenting a motion of no confidence, as Vox demands. The popular party has used other parliamentary tools to expose the "extreme weakness" of the Spanish executive's leader, made use of a sympathetic media apparatus, and once again resorted to the justice system while the street mobilization, on the eve of summer, remains paralyzed.

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 most common practice in democratic countries' political parties is to hold elections in governing bodies with a periodicity of usually four years. In the Catalan PP, however, this has not been the case. A four-year extension has allowed Alejandro Fernández to accumulate two terms in one: he was elected in 2018 in Sitges, but the party did not convene the congress planned for 2022. Four years late and despite multiple challenges and public clashes with Alberto Núñez Feijóo's state leadership, Fernández has managed to survive and this Saturday he has been re-elected with 97.51% of the votes in the formation's sixteenth congress, in an enthronement led by the Galician leader at the Hotel Grand Marina in Barcelona. Furthermore, he has managed to impose his entire plan thanks to Feijóo's full approval, but, according to the Catalan politician, this has been done "from unity." However, the state leader has asked him to look out for the party and has sent a message: "Change cannot be made without Catalonia and much less against Catalonia," he stated.

There are days when a new situation is foreseen, in which even a change of era is sensed. And, from our point of view, this is what happened yesterday in Madrid.  The debate in Congress on Sánchez's explanations went as one might imagine: Sánchez defending himself against the PP with the "you too!" (because, of course, the PP can write encyclopedias about corruption), accusing the justice system of bias and therefore, of lawfare, making a somewhat forced turn, presenting the PSOE as a victim of the corruption of Ábalos and Cerdán, and reducing the crimes to a specific handful of delinquents. And Feijóo saying all sorts of things to him. And Rufián asking for a government plan. And Junts made an unexpected proposal, this one, to tell Sánchez: “we will invest a new socialist president and we will hold elections when the time comes, next year” (a proposal that Sánchez got rid of by inviting Junts to vote for a motion of no confidence from Feijóo, which Junts will not do). This would be an account adjusted to the facts of what we heard yesterday.But there was more, much more. Because, you know what? Feijóo told Sánchez that he will be indicted very soon. And the PP spokesperson in Congress said that there will be people who will start singing, like the corrupter Aldama, who will not go to prison and has saved three million euros in commissions that he will not have to return. In other words, the PP knows what the judges are preparing and what reports the Police and the Civil Guard are preparing. And in the afternoon, Begoña Gómez, Sánchez's wife, had to personally go and hand over her passport to the judge, and Zapatero's entire agenda was leaked.

The Congress of Deputies once again experienced one of those disastrous days this Wednesday that cause citizens to distance themselves from politics. The exchange of recriminations between the Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez, and the leader of the opposition, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has brought no new developments and has only served to further tarnish the political climate, something that, as some spokespersons have rightly warned, primarily benefits the far-right. In a normal democracy, a verdict like the one in the Ábalos case, in a judicial process that has been suspiciously swift and with sentences that some jurists deem disproportionate, would be enough to bring down a government. But it is true that Spain has peculiarities that explain both Pedro Sánchez's resistance to throwing in the towel and why no partner is currently considering supporting a motion of no confidence alongside the PP and Vox.

"What else needs to happen for Pedro Sánchez to resign immediately?". That is what Alberto Núñez Feijóo asked in a press conference convened to assess what he has called the "serious" sentence of the Supreme Court against José Luis Ábalos. The leader of the PP has argued that the only way out is for the Spanish president to call elections "immediately" in view of what the Popular Party considers "a condemnation of Sánchez's government" because the former Minister of Transport played a predominant role both in the first governments of the socialist leader and in the PSOE as organization secretary and in Sánchez's rise.

Spanish politics is bogged down, who will unbog it? It will certainly not be Alberto Núñez Feijóo's PP, which fails to present itself as a governing alternative that convinces anyone, except the PP itself and the only interlocutor and partner it has left, Vox. The situation of the Spanish government oscillates between anxiety and shock, according to the news of each day, each week, and each month. Pedro Sánchez seems determined not to call early elections, or to resist doing so as much as possible, and one can doubt whether this attitude is due to firmness, calculation, or mere stubbornness. But Feijóo is not, in any case, a leader who presents himself with a response capable of generating enthusiasm in the face of the government's wear and tear. For a long time now, his only opposition task has consisted of directing exhortations to Sánchez's investiture partners. Sometimes he blames them, other times he insults them, much less often he hints at wanting to convince them (I won't say seduce them, so as not to sound sarcastic). To Junts and the PNB, in particular, he begs and begs again, like a mendicant friar of politics, to let him have their votes to carry out a motion of no confidence, even an instrumental motion, pretending to sideline Vox. Even so, he does not manage to get the Catalan or Basque right to give him their support. Not because Junts and PNB are particularly satisfied with Sánchez and his government (especially Junts, gripped by a conceptual discomfort that leads it to engage in the gesticulations that everyone already knows), but because they know that the Spanish right's proposal is no acceptable alternative. They know that, however bad the current situation is, the other is objectively worse. With a PP that openly says it is willing to govern with Vox (what else?), and with the demonstrated influence of the Spanish right over State powers such as the police and the judiciary, what may happen in the form of involution —and, if necessary, demolition— of Spanish democracy is easy to imagine and difficult to digest. It is also obvious that the first to suffer the consequences would be the Basques and the Catalans. Very mainly the Catalans.The distrust of Junts and PNB towards the PP also has to do, paradoxically if you will, with what has served the popular party to put Sánchez's government on the ropes: the judicialization of politics. At the beginning of the current legislature, the PP fell into the maneuver of labeling the left-wing government as "illegitimate" — no small matter — and Feijóo predicted a "calvary" for Sánchez that has been becoming a reality in chapters. The harmony between the PP and the patriotic justice is more than evident, and this causes the stalemate to be not only of the government, but of the institutional system. To dislodge the PSOE from power and access it themselves, they have literally perverted the rule of law: this is how they have gained positions and worn down Sánchez, yes, but they have also cornered themselves. Feijóo is six votes short of bringing down Sánchez, only six. And he doesn't get them. He can only beg for them.

In politics, grand pronouncements often last a short time. Eleven months ago, Feijóo pledged not to make a deal with Abascal. Generally, what makes the difference in leadership is knowing how to present and give coherence to one's own strategic options, which is what lends a certain credibility. It is true that these are different times, but Aznar's leadership in the PP represented the right's transition from dictatorship to democracy with a certain consistency. And, in fact, it is from that expansive moment that the PP, in part, still lives. Rajoy opted for continuity. And Feijóo, who has always been short on ideas, now sees himself closer to power, and is increasingly afraid of not being able to form a majority on his own. Beyond the Spanish conservative bloc, the right-wing parties in the peripheral nations are very different from the times of Arzalluz and Pujol, perhaps more ideological but much more practical.

The visit of Alberto Núñez Feijóo to the program El hormiguero, this Wednesday night, was a pleasant experience for the leader of the PP, whom Pablo Motos invited on the same day that José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was testifying as investigated in the National Court. The platform that Antena 3 provided the popular politician to attack the PSOE, however, took a turn just at the end of the interview, when Feijóo had to admit that he does not speak English.

What a coincidence that Antena 3 invited Alberto Núñez Feijóo on the same day that Zapatero had to testify before the judge of the Audiencia Nacional. A strategy to add more media pressure. The leader of the PP appeared on El hormiguero visibly nervous. Before the interview began, Feijóo asked to send a warm greeting to Ilia Topuria, who was badly beaten on Donald Trump's birthday. A disconcerting reaction considering the context of blood and guts of that decadent party. But the gesture seemed an allegory of the new evening we were about to see. The great theater of shadowboxing, those training sessions where the boxer fights an shadow, an imaginary opponent, practicing blows in the air and dodging invisible hooks. Pablo Motos acted as his trainer, a corner man devoted to the cause.