Following the logic of the Popular Party, Pedro Sánchez is less isolated today than Friday. The United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and Portugal, the latter governed by an allied match of the PP, recognized the Palestinian state this weekend. France did it on Monday night with Macron's speech at the UN General Assembly. Recall that Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Isabel Díaz Ayuso agreed that he only benefited from that decision when Sánchez adopted it.
That attack line has been canceled. No one can argue that social democratic, liberal and conservative rulers of the West have become Hamas tools. Maybe Ayuso and Aznar, yes. The former president has come to say that Israelis are fighting in defense of Western countries, a recurring argument of Israeli propaganda that has never taken root in Europe.
Everything is possible with the PP. Monday's press conference allowed us to verify that the game will lose the desire to talk about Gaza very quickly. It is the only way that the fissure between the direction of Genoa is not more evident and what Díaz Ayuso and José María Aznar maintain. The latter defend with passion everything Israel has done in Gaza. For Feijóo, so much blood forces to find a formula with which the internal division is not so noticeable.
The journalists asked Alma Ezcurra, spokesman for the PP on that occasion. It didn't spread much. As for the recognition of the Palestinian state, it referred to years ago. “The position of the Popular Party is the same as in 2014. We defend with the same intensity that Palestine must be a state like Hamas should not play any role in it.” In November of that year, Congress almost unanimously approved a text with which “the Government was urged to recognize Palestine as a state.” It was presented by the PSOE and the PP, then in the government, he gave the vote in favor in exchange for some modifications.
It was a proposition not law (NLP), One of the less relevant parliamentary mechanisms. They are statements in which the recipient is usually the government and that have no binding force. Rajoy's government was not forced to act.
“We are not going to do national politics with a massacre,” said Ezcurra in a way of getting out of the curious tangent coming from a party that has used the situation in Venezuela on numerous occasions to attack the government in the last decade. On those occasions, his position resembled the rabid reaction that the PP has had with Sánchez's decision on Palestine and the accusation of relating the president of the Government to Hamas. The greatest promoters of tension – the opposition is usually regardless of the government in question – they intend to make people believe that the government is on the side of violence.
Undoubtedly, Sánchez's profile in the European Union has experienced a clear decline in a scenario in which the governments chaired by the right are majority. Some of those countries are upset by Sánchez's play to limit 2% military expenditure on GDP, well below what others have accepted. They are the ones who went through the ring that NATO and the European Commission raised with the intention of appeasing Donald Trump.
It is not only Spanish public opinion, but also the European who has already had enough with the nine months of Trump's presidency and believes that European governments should respond more firmly to the US president. A majority in the five major European countries (52%) declares that Europe has been “humiliated” by the agreement Commercial signed by Washington and the European Commission, according to a survey of the French media Le Grand Continent.
That percentage is higher in Spain (56%) and in France (65%). 77% believe that the pact will mostly benefit US companies. 75% say that Ursula von der Leyen defended the European interests poorly.
Therefore, it is difficult for Sánchez's voters to worry that Trump, von der Leyen and NATO general secretary Mark Rutte, now see him with bad eyes. It would be worse the opposite.
While Feijóo has said that Israeli behavior in Gaza is “inadmissible”, the worst epithets have dedicated them to Sánchez, not to Netanyahu. On Friday, he said that “there is no relevant power that does not look at us as an discredited state”, as if all other governments subscribe the usual invective of the PP against the government. To affirm that Brussels would end up placing Sanchez at the same level as to the extreme right -wing governments of Hungary and Poland, which has not happened, the PP has ended up believing its own propaganda.
The party refuses to use the word 'genocide' to define Gaza's events. To do so would force him to support the imposition of sanctions by the European Union, which he does not want to do. That requires ignoring the constant statements of members of the Israeli government who have an unmistakable genocidal tone.
The most recent is by Gila Gamliel, Israeli Minister of Science and Technology and deputy of the Netanyahu party: “We will make Gaza a place in which it is impossible to live until the population abandons and then we will do the same in the West Bank. ”
Promises like this have little to do with Hamas, which does not govern in the West Bank, and yes with ethnic cleaning.
“What Israel is doing is exterminating a helpless people,” said Sánchez on September 8. Some games, such as the PP, believe that it is enough to refer to a NLP of eleven years ago that it was irrelevant.