The spokesperson for the People’s Party in the European Parliament, Dolors Montserrat, said on Sunday that “there is no chance” that the PPsupport the new European Commission if the third vice-president of the government, Teresa Ribera, is part of the cabinet chosen by President Ursula von der Leyen for a second term. “There is no possibility that the Popular Party will support a community government in which Teresa Ribera is after everything that has happened in these two weeks” after the floods in Spain, Montserrat said in a video message on social networks.
The popular leader proposed two options to unblock the situation: that the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, propose “another candidate for the post of commissioner” or the PP will ask that “her suitability be submitted to the secret vote of the deputies who are members of the parliamentary committees which examine Teresa Ribera in the European Parliament”. “We will see if the deputies want to sponsor with their vote a vice president who has a problem of management and public responsibility in which 220 Europeans have lost their lives in the Valencian Community and Castile-La Mancha,” Montserrat said.
The president of PPAlberto Núñez Feijóo, already asked last Thursday at the Congress of Deputies that the government withdraws the candidacy of the third vice-president and minister of ecological transition and demographic challenge, Teresa Ribera, for the post of first vice-president of the European Commission . and proposed to “another person who enjoys the support of Spanish society.”
He PP attributes responsibility for the DANA tragedy in Valencia to Ribera and demands a new candidate from the government, although the EPP has not yet gone so far as to ask for another name and currently poses two conditions: Ribera goes to Congress to give explanations -something that is planned for next week- and that he undertakes to resign if an oral trial is opened because of his management of DANA. Ribera, appointed vice-president of the European Commission for a clean, fair and competitive transition, defended her work in the management of DANA last Tuesday during an angry parliamentary hearing in the European Parliament marked by the previous maneuvers of the PP convince the European People’s Party (EPP) to reject the Spanish candidate.
The pulse of PPsupported by his European People’s Party group in the European Parliament, blocked the necessary green light for the six new vice-presidents of the European Commission and the Hungarian commissioner-designate, a decision hijacked by the crossed vetoes of the people in Ribera, on the one hand, and from the socialists to the Italian vice-president Raffaelle Fitto and the Hungarian commissioner Olivér Várhelyi on the other.
This unprecedented situation endangers the coalition of the pro-European political families who have supported the European Union for decades, and faces one of the most delicate weeks in its history due to the disagreement between the popular and the social democrats. What happens over the next five days in Brussels will be decisive in determining whether the European Parliament will be able to vote on Wednesday 27 to approve the new executive as a whole so that it can begin its mandate on December 1 and, ‘a broader view, perspective, for the survival of the coalition
