The Government has stopped treating the control sessions in Congress as a trance. After going through the most critical moment of his mandate before the summer with the entry into prison of Santos Cerdán, Pedro Sánchez and his Executive have managed to change the pace of the public debate and recover part of the political initiative lost to the opposition. And that has also been transferred to parliamentary dynamics, as is especially evident in the president's face-to-face meetings with Feijóo every Wednesday. For weeks now, the opposition leader has shown signs of having difficulties placing his message in front of a Sánchez who has taken his measure in his dialectical quarrels. Something that is perceptible even in the gestures of both leaders and in the attitude of their fellow ranks.
Several parliamentary partners of the Executive agree in pointing out an anecdote that occurred this week during the intervention of the leader of the PP as an example of the moment that the Government and the opposition are going through. In his turn to speak, Feijoó said from his seat that in Pedro Sánchez's Spain “the honest is punished and the indecent is applauded.” And just at that moment he chose the PP bench to applaud him. In front, the socialists, with Sánchez at the head, writhed in their seats with laughter.
“It's an anecdote, but it really is like this all the time. And it's symptomatic of what we've been experiencing since the return of summer. What we see from our seats is a president who is increasingly relaxed in the face of a very lost Feijóo. We already know that Sánchez is skillful, but the truth is that the PP couldn't make it easier for him,” says a deputy from one of the Government's partners about what he sees every week in the Lower House.
It is not strange to see the PP leader run out of time in his parliamentary questions and not be able to conclude his speech. And it has happened that his team in Genoa has had to qualify or complete his speech later because his messages have been left half-finished or have not been understood well. And Sánchez seems to have located that crack in his adversary's political profile that he does not want to waste. “The question we must ask ourselves is what you contribute to politics. They applaud you to cover with their applause the nothingness of your interventions,” the president snapped this week in the Plenary.
Before, Feijóo had tried every week. That is, condensing into two and a half minutes countless attacks on the Government by land, sea and air without a very clear plot thread. This Wednesday he mentioned Koldo García and José Luis Ábalos but also the president's family, the brothels and the self-employed quota. And something striking happened: to weave together his entire dialectical arsenal, he copied the registered question to the leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal: “Why do you protect criminals and abandon honest Spaniards?” Exactly the approach that Feijóo decided to borrow.
“I think you see the president relaxed in the control sessions because in front of him he has a man who says the same thing every week and who could make the same intervention today as in 2024 or 2023. He doesn't say anything, he doesn't contribute anything. And we do have a management to defend and to confront with his autonomous governments and with his country model hand in hand with the extreme right,” the president's team assessed this week in the halls of Congress.
The previous week, Sánchez blurted out that “cheer up, Alberto” that also caused laughter from the socialist bench, as a gesture of sarcasm towards a leader of the PP who is beginning to have serious difficulties in the polls due to his flight of votes to Vox. It was the president's response to the opposition leader's threat. “The escape is over. You will be summoned to the Senate investigation commission in the month of October. It will be very difficult for you, but you are obliged to tell the truth,” Feijóo told him.
The president's mockery came to confirm the extent to which, according to Moncloa, they see Feijóo in a situation of extreme political weakness. “None of the investigative commissions that they have promoted with their absolute majority in the Senate have been of any use to them, and they know it. On the contrary, they have turned out badly. And that they display that solemnity in a threatening tone as if the president's appearance were a definitive trap makes us laugh. We are going to see it the day he appears,” they warn in the Executive.
This Thursday the PP confirmed that the day chosen for that appearance will be October 30, a date that, in principle, Moncloa has no problem with. “It's been 15 days since we learned about the UCO report and no one has given explanations and no one has asked for forgiveness,” said PP senator Alicia García, in a press conference in which she did not want to reveal the name of the senator who will question the president of the Government.
What they maintain in the Executive is that the PP “will go very badly again” and that the event can become a new opportunity to expose the opposition and to gain political ground. “If they have difficulties in Congress, what happens in the Senate is something to cry about. They have had to meet several times with their parliamentary group to amend their interventions in the investigative committees. And the president has already demonstrated his ability in this type of format. It is not that we are not afraid of the appointment, it is that we believe that it will turn out very well because it will confront two models of combating corruption. That of the PP, protecting the corrupt; and ours, in which we make the responsibilities fall on whoever it is, no matter how much it hurts us,” reasons a socialist leader.
With the evolution of the polls since the return of summer, in Moncloa they claim to be clear that the wear and tear due to the PP's offensive against corruption has been “amortized” and that among the progressive electorate, the right-wing campaigns with the president's brother and partner or with the State Attorney General have not had any impact. And they show their conviction that the scandal of Ábalos, Koldo and Cerdán have managed to “encapsulate” it in the eyes of their voters in the actions of “two or three gulfs” with whom the party broke ties.
Relieved by the freedom this week of Ábalos and Koldo by the judge's decision, they believe in the Moncloa that the case “used up what had to be worn out” and that, from now on, the political game for the next electoral cycle is played in another sphere, that of “the cultural war of measures” that serve to contrast the models of the right and the extreme right on issues such as abortion, immigration or housing.