Andalusia, a flying goal
Speak, people, speak. And the Andalusian people spoke. Spain is on fire. The ballot boxes ratified the winds of change that are coming. The revolution has a name: Juanma. Immense popular majority (58 seats). Moderation. Government for all. Humility. Reforms. Work. Good programme until 2026.
A dignified death for Ciudadanos (0 seats) Marín resigns. Direct blow to Sanchismo in the jaw of Juan Espadas (30). Disappointment in VOX. Macaranazo (14). The left is in the doldrums (5+2). By ideological blocs: 63% centre-right. 37% left. Electoral overturn. Historic day. The "Feijóo effect" has worked. The municipal and regional elections will be the last goal before the general elections and La Moncloa. The Andalusians have freed themselves from the socialist yoke. Even in Dos Hermanas and Conil.
The agitators of the campaign were the three national bosses: Sánchez, Feijóo and Abascal. Among the guests, Lastra reached the top: in Cádiz he accused the PP of being the party of corruption and in Seville he encouraged to "go to the polls so as not to have to take to the streets this Monday to set off the anti-fascist alarm". The same mantra of Iglesias three years ago to form a "cordon sanitaire" in San Telmo and prevent the investiture of Juanma Moreno. Democrats from Hanoi. Or from Tehran.
Yolanda Díaz was at the summit in Córdoba announcing that she "is going to take a step to win Spain". (Profound). And clinging to her countryman from El Ferrol, who is not allowed to rest even in the cemetery of El Pardo, she said: "Vote in the name of Franco's reprisals". (Very profound). We learned from Woody Allen that "the deepest thing is emptiness". And this lady aspires to be the beacon of the new cross-cutting left that plans to begin its "initiatory journey of listening" on 8 July, forty-eight hours after her partner Oltra sits in the dock in Valencia, without resigning. Adding up? Multiply by zero, vicechulísima Yolanda. What a troop!
Four infinite years of Sanchismo have been enough to prove that the social-communist coalition government has failed on all fronts. At home, a large majority of Spaniards have taken to the streets to tell Sánchez that the crises are killing them. In the economy, you only have to look at five bills: electricity, gas, water, diesel and telephone. The Food Bank has empty shelves.
Making ends meet is a miracle. How did we get here? By degenerating. Nothing ever happens. This is the kingdom of never ever. Or, to put it in the words of the minister-spokesperson, Isabel Rodríguez, "we have a lot of money to spend and little time". Let's squander it. It will be her and Ms Meyer, rewarded with almost 150,000 euros for having been Irene Montero's chief of staff. What a loss of earnings for 29 months of digitally obtained official seat!
The gas shortage - heat wave by means of - has become a good business for France, Andorra and Portugal. Now, they are preparing an assault on the accounts of the electricity companies - not the gas companies - which we, the consumers, will pay for.
We are champions in deficit, debt, unemployment, exports and school failure. The countryside warns that wheat is running out and chickens could become a luxury in a couple of months. While the president is handing out millions for green and digital PERTES, the purchase of second-hand cars is on the rise. Petrol can reach three euros a litre. Attention self-employed and taxpayers. Going shopping is an ordeal worse than the Malay drop.
But, not to worry; next year the inflated A's at University, the passing of the course with pending subjects and with the new LOMLOE Celáa-Alegría, the time will have come to bury with honours the culture of effort. The OECD and PISA figures will make up for laziness. And the ministers (collectively) will continue to deceive us wholesale by saying that pensions will rise in line with inflation. Social Security has exceeded 100,000 million in the hole without the Toledo Pact meeting.
From Sánchez to Díaz, Montero and Belarra, via Bolaños and Calviño, they will lie to us every day beyond their means. An excess of public waste now that the ECB will stop buying sovereign debt. The fun is over. Reality will be radical and cruel.
A hot autumn is being prepared, not because of the cuts and tax rises but because the unions and employers have had their subsidies reduced in Castilla y León. Mañueco and the horseman Gallardo should start by reducing theirs as well. A box in the IRPF as the church is asking for. I don't think this will be the last summer but I predict that next autumn will be hotter than this hellish week in the middle of June.
The consequences of this misrule spun by four years of improvisation have brought us to a dead end. The Spanish ship is sailing in a fog. Foreign policy is a chain of nonsense that can be explained but which the champion of transparency does not reveal. The unilateral decisions taken with Ghali, the clandestine letter to Morocco changing the position on the Sahara and the expected reaction of Algeria, our main gas supplier, have led us to ask for EU mediation. This has not prevented the insults to EEAS minister José Manuel Albares or Nadia Calviño's extemporaneous statements blaming Putin. It is the logical consequence of not counting on his ministers, his coalition government and the national parliament. Autocracy does not create Spain.
We know nothing about the collapse of the credibility of our CNI after the Executive revealed that the president and several ministers had been spied on by the Pegasus programme. Has the president been blackmailed? We are in the hands of incompetent people. It will take us months to put this three-way situation back together again, while our situation in the Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla becomes more complicated. The breakdown of the cooperation agreement with Algiers affects many sectors. Mallorca is already suffering the consequences. The State Pact on Foreign Policy and Defence proposed by opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo has become a necessity. Sánchez is now an insurmountable wall to turn the situation in North Africa around and return to normality. The doctor is amortised.
Our president is preparing to give a post-interim reception to all the Atlanticist leaders, with Biden at the helm and Zelenski as the guest star. Madrid will be armoured for two weeks and for the first time the highest level (5) of the National Security Law will be applied. The NATO Summit will provide glitz and glamour - although it will not clean up the image of an erratic Sánchez in foreign policy in the Maghreb and the Mediterranean - which will culminate with an announcement of a greater economic contribution to the defence organisation. Of course, the extra 7 billion won't appease the podemite executive. The Putinites continue to support the invasion of Ukraine. Of course, the enlarged NATO, 40 years later, will also not defend Ceuta and Melilla under its umbrella. And it is doubtful that it will keep an eye on illegal immigration and the trafficking of drugs and people from the Sahel to Europe.
Last Sunday's upset in the Andalusian elections has left Sanchezism shaken; I had already sensed that they were living on the razor's edge. I fear that the European funds (of opaque reptiles) will not resuscitate this PSOE, which has surrendered to the PNV and denies a street in Vitoria to the memory of Miguel Ángel Blanco while Bildu opted for abstention; of this socialism submissive to ERC that despises Justice, that humiliates Lambán's Aragonese and that continues to support in the Valencian Community (Ximo Puch) the cover-up of a paedophile crime perpetrated by her then husband, Luis Rodríguez Icardi, sentenced to five years in prison. These are facts. Oltra-ultra, of Compromís, now blackmails Puch by threatening to bring down the social-communist coalition. Obscene communism.
It follows the same steps as the left has always followed since the 1930s: it does not resign for ethical reasons, to defend democracy, because it is all a plot of the extreme right. The prosecutors and judges have formed a conspiracy instigated by the new Vaticanist fascism. Teresa, the young woman who was abused, was humiliated for lodging a complaint and was persecuted and expelled from her job. She arrived handcuffed before the judge. "If they touch one of us, they touch us all", they said at the rally on Saturday.
Mónica Oltra was the one who demanded the resignations of Camps and Barberá, the one who came to regenerate political life together with Yolanda, Colau, Mónica García and Montero. Her silence betrays the imposture of this liberticidal feminism that pardons abusers such as Juana Rivas and María Sevilla, enthroning them as subsidised "protective mothers". Of course, the Berlin Wall was also called "the protective anti-fascist wall" in the GDR. Dangerous friendships.
This time of economic, political and moral uncertainty will have another special (bittersweet) flavour when in a few days' time the judgements of the Supreme Court against Manuel Chávez and José Antonio Griñán, former presidents of the Junta and the PSOE, accused of embezzlement of public funds (almost 700 million), will be known. Two honest men (ZP, dixit). They may be honest, no doubt, but they are not honest.
If Sánchez has pardoned coup plotters, I don't think he will be opposed for five minutes to freeing and pardoning his own people, including the brother of Pepote Rodríguez de la Borbolla, (Ángel) for looting the Andalusian Junta's coffers with 8 million euros, AND 18 months in jail. Will he at least return the money? No. The days of wine, whores, coke and seafood may be over! Blessed are the drops that have filled the glasses of Andalusian socialist and trade union immorality!
Although Moreno has tiptoed around corruption, the people will once again pass the bill to Dr Pérez-Castejón in the local and regional elections of May 2023. It will be the closest flying target to the general elections. If on 4M/2021, IDA dismantled Iglesias and Podemos in Madrid, on 19J in Andalusia, Juanma has given a deathblow to Don Pedro and Sanchismo.
With these results he will decide to pick up the rancour and sectarianism where they left off. One thousand five hundred days after his ascension to La Moncloa and his assault on the skies, he has taken a stroll over the horizon and contemplated the rainbow from the Falcon. He is already close to the last journey that presents no alternative but permanent democratic involution. From today Pedro Sánchez is more dangerous than ever. While change comes, our revenge will be to survive.
Antonio REGALADO runs BAHÍA DE ÍTACA in:
aregaladorodriguez.blogspot.com