The fun is over
The commander arrived and ordered it to stop. And then Fidel arrived; I mean, Pedro arrived. And his denial of the government crisis 48 hours earlier turned into the biggest political massacre in Spain's democratic history. It is appropriate to listen to the song by the troubadour Carlos Puebla now, precisely now that 62 years after the revolution "Cubans are so hungry that they have even eaten their fear". Events do not happen, they happen. At the same time, the outburst of the Cuban people demanding Liberty, Homeland and Life, food and medicine has coincided with the liquidation of an Executive scorched by pandemics, inefficiency, sectarianism and pardons for the Catalan coup plotters. He has not even been able to reduce the massive ministerial team. The political industry that our admired Gay de Liébana denounced. It was time. Do you think Europe is going to finance this wastefulness?
Yes, here they planned to continue with their fellow travellers since June 2018, playing at democracy, degrading the institutions to take us to an authoritarian system, well trained during the illegal confinement. Carmen Calvo lost the battle against Montero and Belarra, that is, against UP; José Luis Ábalos was mortally wounded by the thunderbolt of his Murcia heist, the nine different versions of the "suitcases of Delcy Rodríguez" and the lies of the Plus Ultra (53 million subsidy to Maduro's friends). Arancha González Laya was a person with a manifest "inexperience" that almost led us to war with Morocco; Isabel Celaá will go down in the history of oblivion for her manifest imposture and incompetence while Pedro Duque was still in the clouds.
Juan Carlos Campo pissed off judges and magistrates, signed the "enabling law" restricting the functions of the CGPJ, left the revolving door ajar to return to his post in the Audiencia Nacional, intimidated the leadership of the Court of Auditors and signed with the king the pardons for the pro-coup rebels, who "will do it again together and with more strength than ever", including the fugitive Puigdemont. Pedro "does not forgive" after so much dirty work. The polls are his convex mirror. J. M. Rodríguez Uribes, head of Culture, they say, is leaving as he came, without knowing what Culture is, or cinema, or bullfighting, or books. Nobody knows who he was or what he has done, but he will collect his succulent "lucrum cessans" as ex-minister for almost two years.
Those whom the "tyrannosaurus rex" president has not touched a hair has been the ministers of Podemos after consulting with Pablo Iglesias, who, apparently, is still in charge of the purple party. He has already predicted that the PSOE will never be able to govern with the right. He is right because at this rate the PS will disappear like "tears in the rain". Even Garzón has been strengthened in his Directorate General for Consumer Affairs, which has become a Ministry to place cronies after forcing us to eat less meat. Has he allied himself with Soros and Gates? Although "if they give me a steak 'al punto', that's unbeatable", his prime minister replied. Unbeatable has nothing to do with the steak, but consistency is not our president's gift. He has just moved his promise to vaccinate 70% of Spaniards until winter. A slip of the tongue? His word, as we well know, is worth less than nothing. "Here they thought they would continue - the Cuban troubadour continues - playing at democracy and the people who in their misfortune had just died". But in Madrid they woke up. At least from uncertainty and despair. More than 130,000 people have already died of the coronavirus. And, moreover, Inés Arrimadas and her liberal (progressive) followers are not going to give in to either the PP or the PSOE. Sanchismo is counting down.
After some of the talking heads - including the valido Iván Redondo - had rolled, it seems that all the infighting was about how to control the European manna moneys (which will be delayed by the floods in Germany, Belgium, Holland and Austria). And above all, who will control it. It seems that Bolaños and Calviño have shared the spoils. Calviño is the all-powerful first vice-president; Yolanda Díaz to second vice-president (let's see if she can explain her three masters without destroying the RAE dictionary with the nonsense of changing Patria for Matria), and the new faces of change Raquel Sánchez, Pilar Alegría, Pilar Llop, Diana Morant and Isabel Rodríguez are the beginning of a new time. In the words of the Venezuelan dictator four years ago, he called it the new beginning. Until then things had not been done well... - Dr Sánchez Pérez-Castejón must have thought - but from now on... change will be "unbeatable" like the chuletón "al punto".
I know the head of Public Administration, government spokesperson and former mayoress of Puertollano. She is a good person and a person of dialogue. She will not overshadow Page. The problem is that her Department of Territorial Policy remains outside the "Mesa de la Vergüenza y el negocio" between the Central Government and the Generalitat. What is the Parliament for? With Pedro Sánchez for nothing. We have just learned that of the Pact for Recovery signed with the opposition to get out of the pandemic a year ago, only 22% has been fulfilled. Neither co-governance with the Autonomous Regions nor a single euro for primary care. The president of Madrid has already explained it to her in Moncloa. "And don't touch my taxes". But public spending is soaring. And the debt. What difference does it make? Public money belongs to no one.
The neutralisation of Miquel Iceta, captive in Culture and Sports - he could be the star of the Japan Olympics - is a masterstroke for the unpresentable Salvador Illa to go "unpacking" the path of the Court of Auditors and accept the endorsement of the Generalitat so that the coup plotters can get their rebellion for free. Although the honourable members of the Public Accounts have opposed it, we will all pay for it through the FLA (a 75,000 million loan that the Catalan leaders will never pay back to the State coffers). Neither modern times, nor a new beginning; more of the same. It's all about survival; only for the president, of course. No Spain, no Constitution, no PSOE. Save the commander-in-chief. That is the objective. And if to do so the "Rasputin" of propaganda has to be thrown over the cliff, it is done in silence without even naming him in this staging without questions - long live transparency! -, and he is thrown into the ditch from the moving car. Sánchez -Tomás ("Invictus") Gómez dixit-, "neither forgets nor forgives". If he knows that he closed the PSM headquarters in Callao.
I analyse the handwriting on Iván Redondo's undated card. Capital letters, unequal left and right margins, inclination of the lines. The young man is intuitive, distrustful, animated, "pleasant", with few original lights - his thing is cut-and-paste - and ambitious. As a strategist he brought Pedro Sánchez to the Moncloa. A miracle. But he forgot something important: that Sánchez is more intuitive, more distrustful, more "agradaor", taller, copies and pastes his doctoral thesis like nobody else, alone or in the company of others, and is much more ambitious than Napoleon. "I am the president", he reminded Ana Pastor on La Sexta. He made a beginner's mistake: exposing them to the weekly television shows during the pandemic without having a single word for the victims and their families. And that, and the pardons, will not be forgiven by the voters. The 4M with Isabel Ayuso was the final straw. Iván's signature confirms that he believes he is the centre of the world. But Sánchez's is that of the king of the Galaxy. The fun is over. The commander arrived and ordered it to stop. But he goes his own way. Changing everything so that nothing changes.
President Sánchez is keeping Marlasca, who deserves to be out, but he still has a lot of damage to do in the Basque Country. With the ETA members close to home, the next step is to release them and find them jobs, flats and pensions. And that is where the PNV will continue to support the tenant of La Moncloa and demand that the Caja Única social security fund be broken up. Another bloodless coup d'état. I am not talking about daydreaming. Sánchez will swallow. As he has swallowed with the Trans law, the Euthanasia law, the Democratic Memory law (sounds like a German Democratic Republic) to destroy the Valley of the Fallen. They will end up tearing down the biggest cross in the world, although they can replace it with a hammer and sickle. The base may work if they dynamite the four evangelists.
The tribute to the victims of COVID-19 on the esplanade of the Royal Palace without a simple wooden cross as a mark of respect for the majority of the victims and their families was a full-blown Masonic performance. We are not a confessional country, true, but the Constitution protects the majority religion. A cross does not bother believers, atheists or agnostics like Tierno Galván. Out of sensitivity and empathy. What the president lacks. And the street knows it. King Felipe VI, unfortunately, remains out of place. Neutralised. Pérez Castejón considers himself the new encore head of state. For the moment. Although Minister Bolaños assures that they are not going to change the Constitution. That's fine. They could start by respecting the institutions and simply comply with and enforce the Magna Carta. We need the deployment of the rule of law throughout the national territory.
The spectacle of harassment and demolition of the Constitutional Court after declaring that the state of alarm was not the right formula for dealing with the pandemic because it invaded fundamental rights and that it had to implement the state of emergency in order to comply with the law is undignified. And miserable. The pressure on the president and vice-president by Sánchez and Calvo (r.i.p.), politically speaking, reaffirms that for this executive there are no limits to morality. The delegitimisation of the institutions is the first step towards regime change. The bravery of the vice-president of the TC, Encarnación Roca, denouncing that "she also received calls from the Government to change her vote", deserves to be included in this Bahía. Thank God she did not.
Conde-Pumpido's (unsanctioned) insults to the six members who voted against confirm that he is the Trojan horse to blow up the High Court. Pumpido is the Tezanos in the Judiciary, or to put it another way, he is the Carl Schmitt of the "total state" (totalitarian) and creator of enabling laws (Hitler, 1933). Conde-Pumpido (I was there) said in 2006 in the Senate when he was attorney general under Zapatero "that the flight of the prosecutors' robes will not avoid contact with the dust of the road". All an opportunistic philosophy to culminate his career as a substitute for the bizcochable president Juan José González Rivas. Ollero, the third member who said yes to the Government also aspired to that post. And this guy was the PP's legal expert? The head of state receives the heads of the TC and the TS as if he were receiving two ghosts in audience.
As if this humiliation were not enough, Margarita Robles, unconditional with the pardons because of her loyalty to Sánchez - "taller and more handsome than the King", disappointed us once again with her "doctrinal lucubrations" of the TC and her "lack of vision of State", as much as the institutional declaration of the new Minister of Justice, whose most solemn contribution in the Senate was to annul the reduction from 21 to 10 % of VAT for hairdressers after having been promised by the PSOE. Remember it yourself and remind others of it in the next vote and in the following ones.
In short, a gofer. As a minister she will be worse than Lola Delgado. Pilar Llop, in line with her government colleagues - none of whom has dared to describe Cuba as a dictatorship - read on the telepronter that "the Executive respects, but does not share the resolution on VOX's appeal". It is immoral because it is thanks to VOX that the Catalan coup plotters could be tried, and it has been demonstrated that the state of alarm is unconstitutional, as were the appointments of Rosa María Mateo (RTVE), Iván Redondo and Pablo Iglesias as members of the CNI.
Any responsibility, resignations, resignations? None. That's as far as we could go. They are all irresponsible. After this setback by the Constitutional Court, the logical thing would be another legal setback in autumn for the six months without parliamentary control of the extension of the state of alert. Will the commander-in-chief resign? No. Even if he grants himself extraordinary powers with the National Security Law which, I fear, his parliamentary partners will not accept the term national. State Security Law? Security Law of the Confederated Peoples of Spain? There we have the intrepid former head of Paradores, Óscar López to light the way for communication by reminding us of the third (forgotten) reason why we should vote for them in the future.
They are disarming the State and, if we do not continue in resistance, they will end up imposing their pending revolution of '34, which took us directly to the Civil War of 1936. The Judges' Associations have protested against the attacks of Notaria Mayor del Reino. Whatever. The progressives of her Association of Judges for Democracy support her as a heroine.
I end up believing that Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares will not follow in the footsteps of that EU "drone" High Representative for Foreign Policy Josep Borrell, Sánchez's ambassador to Ibero-America under the Bolivarian Rodríguez Zapatero. The silence of Pope Francis is very painful for Catholics on the island.
Cuba has been a dictatorship since 1959. Here they thought they would continue - I continue with Carlos Puebla - to say that the creeping, outlaw bandits were ravaging the country. And here the Castro and Diaz-Canel hitmen are still summarily judging innocent young citizens who are only shouting for freedom. They have said ¡Basta Ya! to lies and hunger.
Here, the president has already made it clear that Cuba is not a democracy. That is good. The only reality is that electricity is rising to historic highs (101 euros per Mg/hour), punishing large and small companies and the self-employed; oil prices are falling and diesel is rising, the stock market and foreign tourism are falling and uncertainty and hunger queues are rising exponentially. The fun is over, the comandante arrived and ordered to stop (encore). Long live Cuba Libre!
Antonio Regalado directs BAHÍA DE ÍTACA at: aregaladorodriguez.blogspot.com