The PP of Alberto Núñez Feijóo took its offensive against the government of Pedro Sánchez in Brussels to the extreme by questioning the management of DANA, which cost the lives of more than 200 people in Valencia. Protecting Carlos Mazón, who was out of the game in the hours before the disaster, and attacking Teresa Ribera is the strategy that the Spanish people outsourced to Europe at the key moment: the consideration of the socialist to join Ursula’s cabinet der Leyen von as vice-president of Competition.
While the evaluation of all the vice-presidents has been postponed for the moment without date – a merit that the Feijóo PP has attributed to itself – and the “Von der Leyen majority” of the EPP, socialists and liberals does not hold that by a thread, the delegation of Spanish conservatives redoubled the offensive during the debate on DANA, which took place in a practically empty room, even if they placed the new argument to reject the candidate of Pedro Sánchez in disaster management. “Will the competent minister be rewarded when there are still unfound bodies under the mud?” asked MEP Esteban González Pons.
The strategy of attrition against the government in Europe is not new. It was inaugurated by Pablo Casado, who experienced his most critical moments during the pandemic, when he asked the European Commission to investigate the number of deaths from coronavirus in Spain. However, the emphasis was placed on the management of European funds.
It all started during the pandemic
He tried to put the first brakes when negotiating the terms of the recovery and resilience mechanism, which constituted a lifeline for countries hardest hit by the pandemic crisis, such as Spain and Italy. The intention of the Spanish PP was that the aid would be conditional so that the coalition of PSOE and Unidas Podemos could not comply with the measures of its government program, such as labor reform. This did not come to fruition and, in fact, a good part of the promises in the agreement signed by Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias were part of the recovery plan for which Spain has already received more than 50 billion euros.
But the PP has devoted all this time to sowing doubt about the management of European funds. He even imposed a mission on the European Parliament, which he often managed to present as a European investigation. Even though it was an entirely politicized body controlled by one of its own, this delegation found no indication of any infraction.
This happened without pain or glory after months of noise and accusations, to say the least, of lack of transparency in management. But suspicions about the misuse of funds were constant and Casado went so far as to say that there was a warning for excessive public spending that was non-existent, as amended by the European Commission itself.
Judicial power and amnesty
Another of the fights, already with Feijóo at the head of the PP, concerned pension reform, wondering if the government was going to reach this stage of the recovery plan. The popular people suffer a new setback. Ultimately, this reform continued. But Feijóo questioned this agreement with the community government in Brussels and assured that the reform that ignited the streets of France was better.
But the PP’s great battle has been to question the situation of the rule of law in Spain. In this case he used the platform of the European Parliament, often distorted compared to that of Madrid and which makes us lose sight of the fact that it is a politicized institution in which the EPP has allied itself with numerous occasions with the extreme right. “The problem with the rule of law in Spain is its government”, was the message left by the Spanish popular delegation during one of the debates during which Vox assured that it was the “worst of history”, thus placing it behind on the democratic level. terms of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.
In the European Parliament, we are used to the Spanishization of debates. In the middle of the pre-election campaign, a session took place on the “Koldo case”. But the real headache in Brussels was the reform of the judiciary, which the PP blocked for almost five years, despite the fact that it constituted one of the warnings of the European Commission in its reports on the situation of the rule of law in Spain.
Finally, the Feijóo PP demanded unprecedented mediation from the European Commission, which served as a parapet to reach an agreement after having blown the bridges twice with the agreement already reached. The party, through Esteban González Pons, had maneuvered with the Commissioner of Justice, Didier Reynders, before one of his visits to Spain to unblock the CGPJ.
An unprecedented crisis
Despite this, the Government accepted mediation and, after several obstacles put in place by the PP, which jeopardized what had been its proposal, an agreement was reached to renew the governing body of judges.
One of the excuses invoked by the PP for refusing to negotiate the renewal of the CGPJ was the approval of the amnesty for independence leaders. And they have also used this theme, so far with little success, in Brussels. PP and Ciudadanos even sent a letter to EU ambassadors warning them of the “democratic degradation” in Spain.
The use, in particular, of the European Parliament to attack Sánchez has been a constant: the coronavirus, the Koldo case, the negotiations with the separatists and a long period in newspaper archives. And now the popular parties are going even further by exhausting Ribera, even if it means blowing up the majority that traditionally operates in the EU alongside the socialists and liberals and leading to a political crisis with unknown consequences.
