The People’s Party parliamentarians will spend their month’s salary on therapy. They will end up like Tony Soprano bursting into tears when he saw a group of ducks take flight. Everyone is looking at each other wondering if Genoa will let the alleged error pass without forcing resignations or if it will impose changes in the functioning of the parliamentary group. Everything seems to indicate that it will be the first, although no one is really sure. Self-inflicted wounds are the ones that leave the most painful scar.
For great ills, great audiovisual remedies. The marketing department had a great idea. Bring María del Mar Blanco, sister of Miguel Ángel, to the chamber to absolve Alberto Núñez Feijóo of all his sins. She, who is a senator, appeared in Congress during Pedro Sánchez’s appearance to grant the seal of sanctity to the party leader and cast her gaze on the president. Not from the start of the session. We had to find the right effect. The show had to have the greatest impact possible.
This happened in the 35th minute of the match which started at nine in the morning. Seeing her, the PP deputies stood up and began a long ovation, interrupting Sánchez. They should have knelt down and asked for forgiveness. For some reason, Miguel Tellado declared during the group’s meeting on Monday that “there are no guilty parties here, we are all responsible.” They had all sinned, according to Genoa’s interested version. Feijóo and Cuca Gamarra embraced Blanco, sitting next to the former.
Blanco had been very touched the day before at the start of the Senate plenary session. Francisco Javier García Gaztelu, known as Txapote and convicted as the perpetrator of the murder of Miguel Ángel Blanco, is one of the prisoners who, it is said, could benefit if the six years and nine months he spent in prison in France. The senator decided to volunteer to participate in the damage control measure. After all, the PP is his party, which has given him the opportunity to pursue a political career since 2009.
The future situation of Txapote was one of the most sensitive issues. His photo was on the cover of ABC on Tuesday with 24 other ETA prisoners who were going to benefit. In his case, the newspaper says he could be released from prison next year. This is not true. His sentence will not be served until 2031, as was already planned since the maximum length of stay in prison will expire on that date. The National Court accepted it in 2014, under the Rajoy government, after an appeal by the detainee to accumulate the sentence already served in France.
Feijóo needed all the help he could get. In the morning, I had to read the opinion of an ABC columnist, fairly representative of the state of mind of the right: “The reduction of the sentences of ETA members leaves the opposition facing a diabolical situation. “That of being perceived as traitors or idiots.” Neither option is good for Genoa. Idiots do not have a long life expectancy at the head of a party and traitors, even less so.
For this reason, Feijóo began his speech in a hyperventilated state. From the start, I had to express superlative anger. “You spoke about the dignity of migrants. I expressly ask you to withdraw the law that removes more than 300 years of prison for those convicted of ETA terrorism,” he said. He was speaking after the appearance of Pedro Sánchez to explain the issue of immigration, requested by the PP. The party had other priorities on Wednesday.
This is the week in which the Provincial Court of Madrid gave way to the investigation of Begoña Gómez by Judge Peinado, with the exception of the Air Europa rescue case. The PSOE can no longer say that this is madness on the part of a determined judge ready to render a great service to the right before his retirement. White and bottled, they said, including the Minister of Justice.
There are only a few clues that are very far from being able to be defined as a crime of influence peddling, a difficult task as the Court itself admits, but Peinado can take as much time as he wants . And it’s been a long time in Spanish justice. The duration of a judicial investigation is generally measured in years and not months.
The first attempt to strike the blow ended in a resounding failure on the part of the government spokesperson. On Tuesday, Pilar Alegría said in a press conference that “the Court indicates that there is a prospective, generic and imprecise investigation.” He also told surprised reporters that “with this resolution, what seems clear is that the filing of this complaint is approaching.”
Both statements are false. At most they can reflect the hopes that the president’s wife’s defense had. As an analysis of the judiciary, they make no sense and undermine the credibility of all future statements by the minister who speaks every week on behalf of the Government.
A difficult week was ahead for Sánchez. Now he can’t believe his good luck. The PP’s slippage made headlines and once again called into question the entity of Feijóo’s leadership and the parliamentary work of his squire, Miguel Tellado.
Sánchez took full advantage of this during Wednesday’s plenary session. “Do you know what you are voting for or not? » he asked. Feijóo received one sarcasm after another. “The problem of this country is an opposition which has no one at the wheel,” he declared in a sentence chosen to be harmful, because that is what the president of the Association of Victims of terrorism (AVT), also a great ally. of the PP, in his first reaction.
Sánchez does not even believe in the hypothesis of an involuntary error of the PP, product of negligence. He denied that there had been a “reduction of sentences”, since “only the time spent (in prison) abroad is taken into account”. That’s why he sold the idea of a botched plot. “You knew that and that’s why you voted for it. “They knew what they were voting for,” he accused his rivals.
Finally, the definitive humiliation: projecting the shadow of Isabel Díaz Ayuso. “You don’t decide anything. The problem is that the boss doesn’t let him do it.” He repeated it in four consecutive sentences and, as it did not seem enough to him, he used this sentence a fifth time. He had transformed his appearance into an opposition monitoring session.
During the control session itself, a few minutes later, the PP repeated his attempt to exonerate himself. Tellado, whose management of the parliamentary group is called into question, unscrupulously appropriated the names of the socialist elected officials assassinated by ETA. He showed a photo montage with the faces of twelve of them. “Are you going to be able to look your family members in the face? » he asked Vice President Montero.
It wasn’t enough for Tellado. Once seated in his seat, he continued speaking and holding up the images while Minister Óscar López answered another question. Rep. Macarena Montesinos laughed and showed the photos. An exercise in parliamentary hooliganism which is not provided for in the rules of the House.
“Where were these two madmen when ETA existed?” asked Gorka Landaburu, who survived an ETA attack. “They have crossed all the limits of dignity and the minimum respect that must be respected.”
The most energetic response to Tellado was that of Maria Jauregi, daughter of Juan Mari Jauregi, civilian governor of Gipuzkoa and assassinated by ETA in 2000. “Let’s see if you can look me in the eyes and tell me that you will no longer use Aita’s image as a throwing weapon and to see if once and for all you respect her memory,” he told her on Twitter.
The leader of the Basque socialists reminded him of the case of Juan Priede, PSE councilor in Orio, whose photo also appeared in Tellado’s collage. The approach to Basque prisons of the ETA member who assassinated him years later took place with the Aznar government five months after the assassination of Miguel Ángel Blanco, said Eneko Andueza. “In 2000 he was released, also with Aznar as president. Just a year and a half later, he murdered our partner Priede. No one in the PSOE took advantage of this crime to accuse Aznar of being complicit with the terrorists.
The leaders of the PP have the right and the obligation to keep alive the memory of their own people murdered by ETA, of those who ultimately gave their lives to defend democratic ideals. What they also do is use them as essential raw material for their opposition work and spin shots. We must ask ourselves where this strategy lies in the “moral abyss” mentioned by Feijóo. Dead bodies should not be part of political ploys used to try to win headlines or elections.
