In the PP alarms are going off with the drift of Alberto Núñez Feijóo in Congress. The opposition leader choked up again this Wednesday in his face to face with Pedro Sánchez during the control session. In an attempt to attack the Executive due to Yolanda Díaz's lapse, in which she mistakenly referred to the continuity of the “Government of corruption” (instead of “Coalition Government”), Feijóo decided to make a joke. “Every time I ask him about corruption, he tells me that the economy is growing. And I ask him today what economic data justifies that his vice president, in a lapse of sincerity, has told us that there is still a government of corruption for a while,” he told Pedro Sánchez.
In reality, the leader of the PP did not know how to see that he had put the newspaper library on a plate for the president to dispatch at will in his reply. “We have any lapses, Mr. Feijóo. And you are the champion of lapses. Or is it that when you say that Huelva is in the Mediterranean and that Orwell wrote his work 1984 “In 1984, and not in 1949, they are not lapses, but lack of culture?” he responded amid laughter from the Government bench.
Sánchez's blow to Feijóo did not go unnoticed in the Popular Party, in which concern about the parliamentary actions of its leader has been increasing in recent weeks. Regarding this Wednesday, on Génova Street they consider the strategy of trying to use Yolanda Díaz's lapse to be directly unsuccessful. “We were wrong,” they told him from the PP leader's own circle, where they also recognized that it was the President of the Government who emerged victorious from the parliamentary face-to-face in Congress. “He has hurt us,” they added, as parliamentary sources confirmed to elDiario.es.
Errata in the speeches, unfinished interventions due to not calculating the time correctly or even clarifications after his words by his own cabinet make up a collection of stumbles by Alberto Núñez Feijóo during the parliamentary scuffles with the president, who has also managed to recover some political breath since the return of summer precisely because of the errors of the PP and despite the delicate judicial situation of the Executive.
It has also become common for the loudest applause from the PP bench to be provoked not by its leader but by interventions by other deputies. This Wednesday, for example, was the case of spokesperson Ester Muñoz, who inflamed her colleagues by describing it as “disgusting” that the EH Bildu deputy, Mertxe Aizpurua, launched anti-fascist proclamations and warned of the rise of the extreme right.
“Mr. Sánchez, we will never forgive you for allowing the woman who pointed out people in Spain from her newspaper to kill them to make these speeches in this Chamber. How disgusting, how disgusting, how disgusting!”, the deputy launched in the middle of the ovation from the entire PP bench.
For weeks now, the Government has stopped treating Sánchez and Feijóo's melee every Wednesday as a political trap. In fact, at the Moncloa they are convinced that the control sessions “do well” for the president since the return of summer.
“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 in the halls of Congress after one of the last clashes.
This parliamentary dynamic also means that Sánchez's appearance in the Senate next week within the framework of the investigation commission into the 'Koldo case' takes on a different dimension. For the PP, which has been threatening for a year with the appointment, it will be the great opportunity to politically punish the president for the corruption case that keeps Santos Cerdán in preventive detention and with which it tries to make a general case: from illegal financing of the PSOE neither proven nor even indicated in the case, to the offensive in the courts against his direct relatives.
In the Government, however, they have taken the preparation of that appearance as an opportunity to “portrait again” the opposition. “They are already indistinguishable from Vox in their forms and have nothing to offer except noise based on non-existent facts. And the president will tell the truth: to defend emphatically that the PSOE is a decent party that acts against corruption. And to remember that the PP is not there to give us lessons about anything,” says a socialist deputy.
The appointment, for which the PP has not yet plucked the daisy over the senator chosen to question the president, will be on October 30 at nine in the morning, a few hours after the state funeral that will be held in Valencia for the dead of the 2024 dana and which Sánchez himself will attend.