Sánchez and Feijóo reproach each other for the lack of level of their alliances to face “the future of the world”

The Congress of Deputies is still unclear about when to organise a major specific debate on the war in Ukraine and the new world order unilaterally redefined by Donald Trump , but the leaders of the two major parties in Spain hinted at an appetiser on Wednesday. A hint to give an idea of ​​what to expect. The leader of the opposition, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, finally asked the president, Pedro Sánchez, in the weekly control session, if the government was the “appropriate” one in the current situation and reproached him for allowing himself to belittle him and his votes with the partners he has while “the world chooses its future”. Sánchez resorted to an “abstraction” in his reply when he asked Feijóo the hypothesis that after the last elections he would have really managed to govern in coalition with Vox and with the ultra leader, Santiago Abascal, as vice president: “There is no comparison between his potential coalition government and this one”. The debate on the new world order will have to wait.

The Government is also unclear about when it is appropriate to open a session in the Lower House to address the participation of Spain and the European Union in this crisis, how to deal with the revived Trump and what to do or when to increase investment in security and defence, in accordance with the new demands of the United States, NATO and our partners. The Executive and the Socialist group maintain that Sánchez himself will ask to appear "when he has something concrete to say" and the PP, despite what they say in public, have not registered a formal request to demand these explanations. In the control sessions of the Executive in Congress, the PP deputies continue with their competition to find ways around the ministers they consider to be most cornered by the noise of alleged cases of corruption or most cited in ongoing legal cases, particularly those that involve the family circle of the president or those who appear in some report or procedure in the Koldo case, the Ábalos case or the PSOE case . The same thing happened this Wednesday, again with a strong focus on the first vice president, María Jesús Montero, now also confirmed as general secretary of the Andalusian PSOE and its next candidate.

Feijóo wanted to put everything in his question. In the reformulated statement he already included the warning that with the appropriate Government he wanted to refer to “nationalist, separatist, communist and Sortu-Bildu” partners. But he quickly went on to conclude that with a second vice president, Yolanda Díaz, leader of Sumar, who votes against parliamentary initiatives sponsored by the PSOE (this Tuesday to reject a reform of the Land Law ) and breaks the voting discipline, a bad image is offered inside and outside Spain with a Cabinet that “has no sense of State or the stature to defend our country.” The president of the PP also understands that in this international scenario it is not appropriate for the Government to be poisoned about whether it is “more or less a friend of Trump” or to direct insults at the opposition because what it should do is seek the support of “the majority party in Congress and the Senate” in the alleged increase in Defense spending that is predicted. And finally, before reproaching him for being subject to the “whim of his pro-independence partners” and being “the problem for all Spaniards”, he concluded: “While the world is defining its future, Sánchez is only concerned about his own personal future: spending a little more time in the Moncloa Palace”.

Sánchez defended himself again with Spain's economic data and with the measures applied to improve the welfare state, he was interested in whether the PP's autonomous communities are finally going to carry through to the end the rejection that Feijóo has imposed on the proposal to forgive up to 83,000 million euros of the debts acquired since the financial crisis of 2008 and on the international situation he resorted to that comparative abstraction of possible coalition governments. The leader of the PSOE resorted to imagination to put forward the thesis that if in the 2023 elections the PP and Vox had added votes to be able to govern, Feijóo would be in La Moncloa by now and Santiago Abascal, the far-right leader, would be his vice president and the one responsible for "defending the United States tariffs against Spain"; The deputy secretary for Institutional Action of the PP, Esteban González Pons, would be Foreign Minister after disqualifying Trump in an opinion article as an “orange ogre” and “male of a pack of gorillas”. Sánchez concluded: “There is no comparison between his potential coalition government and this one”. And he demanded that Feijóo stop portraying himself and break with Vox, as the CDU has done with the ultras in Germany after the recent elections.

The debate on control of Congress then revolved around the PP's attempt to surround Vice President Montero with a string of accusations of all kinds in order to start the electoral campaign to undermine her candidacy to compete with the popular Juan Manuel Moreno for the Junta de Andalucía, from her past as Minister of Finance, to the ERE case, to 97 tax increases, to her lies or now to the debt forgiveness of Catalonia without mentioning the commitments with the other autonomous regions.

Standing ovation for Aitor Esteban

The moment given to the PNV spokesman, Aitor Esteban, who has been in Congress for 20 years and will soon leave his seat to assume the presidency of his party's Euskadi Buru Batzar, did offer a unique image of the Chamber. Esteban, who has won awards for his oratory and reputation for being polite and moderate, rather than asking Sánchez, supported him in his considerations on "the geopolitical dystopia" and "the plutocracy of the United States to shamelessly defend" everything that many Europeans have been fighting for a century. The Basque deputy praised the leadership of Sánchez between Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer and demanded more "concrete measures" in the cause of an "embryo of European Defense without the United States." And, to culminate his parliamentary stage in Madrid, he renewed a demand that he has been demanding for years from all the governments of Spain: that they approve a new law of official secrets to declassify some historical documents. Sánchez reported that Spain is “well established” as a “participatory, respected and admired country” that leads the contributions to peace and security in Ukraine, the West Bank and Brussels on three axes: “Europeanism, multilateralism and defence of international law”.

The deputies of the PSOE, Sumar, ERC and the Coalición Canaria party stood up at that moment and gave Esteban a standing ovation as he left, while those of Junts, Vox, EH Bildu, Podemos and the PP remained seated, and some of them took the opportunity to make fun of him. Sánchez congratulated him for his brilliant oratory and promised him again that the law on secrets would be passed in this legislature. Esteban could only put his hand on his heart in gratitude.