“The money (from taxes) goes to pay ransoms for the stars of the (Gaza) Flotilla, to illegal financing of parties, to prostitution, to parties or to pay favors to some media outlets.” The Popular Party went all out in Wednesday's control session. Eh, not so fast. It was not a deputy from that party who uttered the phrase with which to harshly attack the Government, but rather the Junts spokesperson, Míriam Nogueras.
The socialists laughed enthusiastically for another week at Alberto Núñez Feijóo's problems in fitting a good shot into Pedro Sánchez's chin. The smile froze immediately when Nogueras culminated in the next intervention the turnaround of his match in recent months. Junts is now the main opposition party or, more correctly put, the party that can do the most damage to the Government from the opposition.
Nogueras ended with an easy-to-interpret play on words: “Perhaps we should talk less about schedule changes and start talking about the time of change.” Sánchez played it safe and limited himself to defending the proposal of not making the time change again and boasting that “the number of officially protected homes that are under construction” has increased by 63%. It was not convenient for him to dig deeper into the wound while waiting for events.
It is true that some of Junts' complaints are not new, nor are the comments about the bad moment of its relations with the PSOE. It was his rhetoric, copied from the PP speech, that attracted attention, in addition to the reference to “change.”
As an example, he denounced that two bills from his party on multiple recidivism of foreigners and the fight against home occupation are frozen in Congress. They are because the socialists have no room to negotiate issues that will be rejected by their left-wing partners and because they have no intention of joining the right-wing parties so that they can move forward.
In short, Nogueras was demanding something that he knows the Government cannot grant him. Junts sources later made it clear that they do not care: “Today's statement is not free. This is serious. We had never talked about change.”
It was not because the Junts spokesperson had gotten up with great energy after having a sausage for breakfast. A group of mayors from the party met with Carles Puigdemont in Waterloo on Monday with the intention of asking him to be tougher in his anti-immigration message. It was an appointment that they had requested only a month after meeting the general secretary, Jordi Turull. They are nervous because Junts is losing ground to the far-right Aliança Catalana in the debate on security, also at the local level.
Only one day before, Puigdemont had marked doctrine with a brief speech. Without mentioning Aliança, the party leader wanted to calm things down. He called the messages of the pro-independence far-right “fads”, “pendulums” and “occurrences”: “Sometimes there is a temptation to succumb to fashions and there are people who do it. But someone must remain in the country who has this state perspective, this long view of the construction of the nation, which never ends and is permanent.”
It is a message not very different from the one that the PP uses to confront Vox and that has not been useful to stop the rise of the extreme right in the polls. What is clear is that the Junts mayors believe that it is of no use to them. They want a strong hand, not big words about the “state gaze.”
The last survey of July The CEO – public body of the Generalitat – foresees between ten and eleven seats for Aliança (now it has two) and 28 to 30 for Junts (it had 35 in the last elections) with a view to the next regional elections. The approval rating of Sílvia Orriols, leader of Aliança and mayor of Ripoll, is almost identical to that of Puigdemont.
What did not keep the socialists up at night was Feijóo's intervention in Congress. In the absence of new ideas, he believed that there was nothing better than to start with Yolanda Díaz's slip of the day before (“the government of corruption remains for a while”). Very daring, considering that he can boast a long collection of lapses for lack of a better word to define them. On Monday, he said that the hours worked in Spain “they have fallen 8.9% since 2018” and that, therefore, productivity has decreased. If the first were true, which it is not, productivity would have risen dramatically after the last few years of GDP growth.
Sánchez was not born yesterday and he came prepared. The truth is that he had it easy: “You are a champion of lapses. Or when you say that Huelva is in the Mediterranean or that Orwell wrote his work '1984' in 1984 and not in 1949, it is not a lapse but lack of culture?” Another day in which Sánchez couldn't stop laughing and Feijóo had a look of perplexity on his face. In the corridors, he boasted that it had been a great success to ask the president if the PSOE had been financed illegally. Sánchez said no. What did you expect him to say?
The ministers left the plenary session with the intention of subtracting “dramatism” from Junts' notices. The nationalist party ruled out talk of possible support for a motion of censure. That is not the territory in which they are moving at the moment nor does it benefit them to feed the theory that they can carry Feijóo to La Moncloa, which is something that Gabriel Rufián has been warning about for a long time.
“As we are now, there is no point in continuing and the gum is no longer working,” Junts sources said. What they can do is announce that they will not vote in favor of even a decree in favor of healthy eating for children. That would turn the legislature into a walking dead, although, as seen in the movies, it is not so easy to kill a zombie.