We are in the darkest week of our disenchantment. The XVth Legislature -for as long as it lasts-, will be the cornerstone for the progressives to achieve their permanent involution. Their advance will take us straight back to 1931, the "luminous" Republican period in which, thanks to the PSOE of Largo Caballero, Indalecio Prieto and Juan Negrín; to the envy of President Manuel Azaña and the ambition of the fascists and separatist Nazis (ERC and PNV), they led us straight to civil war.
On 17 August we went into "constituent mode". Blackmailers and blackmailed in the same boat rowing together and in the same direction. Spain adrift. In its beginning is our end. Then don't say you didn't know it.
Constituent time
The results of 23-July have plunged us into ungovernability. We have been left out in the open, in the midst of a sea of doubts, in a dark time, trapped in a chess game where the king is drowned in the middle of nowhere. Feijóo wins but will not be able to govern. And in politics that is called losing. Sánchez, wearing a chulapo cap, has gone down to Morocco on holiday to laugh at all of us. From Marrakech he has issued the first fatwa of his holiday: Ceuta must be blocked so that Vivas can experience first-hand that the cordon sanitaire of the Tinell pact is still as valid as in 2003.
What will he not do in these discreet and secret conversations led by the Bolaños-Montero-Yolanda-Otegui quartet to enthroned him once again in the Monclovite mansion? In such a crucial week, Sánchez is neither here nor expected. Always at the end of the road. A politics filled with hybrid tension.
In the heads of the best team of scriptwriters no one would have imagined such a grotesque situation: the government of Spain is in the hands of a criminal, Carles Puigdemont, possibly the citizen who has done the most damage to our democracy, including talks with Putin's agents so that Russia would lend (paying, of course) up to 20,000 soldiers to defend the Catalan republic. We depend on a fugitive. How did we get here? By degenerating, acquiescing, keeping quiet and swallowing.
All their advances and progress are at the cost of lies, wickedness and manipulation. We are moving forward, unchecked and backwards towards a Spain, nation of nationals, euphemism for a constituent, totalitarian and republican Spain.
The ideology of money
All parliamentary support for Spain's governability has been paid for first in money. Then, in indecent concessions. Let us not forget that nationalism is insatiable. Insatiable and always victims. Victimism was the main basis of Nazism as we learned from Joseph Goebels' eleven principles of institutional propaganda. Sanchista's projection of Núñez Feijoo was a conditional reflection of his complex psychological activity. And without scruples.
Money does not need levers to move the world. The salivation of the PSOE secretary general automatically triggers his cosmic ambition for power.
Against all odds, the PP has deflated and gone into depression; the socialists have sold their defeat as a triumph. Sánchez represents the left, the left of the left, the separatists, the coup plotters and even the fractious Podemos who want their own group in Congress and a minister in the future coalition government.
We were talking about money. ERC and Junts have reminded the government that the FLA (Autonomous Settlement Fund), created by Rajoy so that the profligate Autonomous Regions could breathe in the face of the closure of the markets, must be closed due to political bankruptcy. They demand the cancellation of all the debt (187 billion); of this, 74 billion corresponds to Catalonia, 45 billion to Valencia and 28 billion to Andalusia, most of which was requested during the socialist reign.
Madrid has always had access to the capital markets and never used the FLA. The cancellation would be extremely damaging to honest managers. An example: the Catalan debt is equivalent to two and a half years of Madrid's personal income tax collection. Not content with that, Aragonés is going to ask for an extra 20,000 million a year more. Historical debt, I suppose. And a Tax Agency that collects all taxes.
In short, a Basque Agreement (with a secret and opaque formula) to pay only for the services provided by the State in Catalan territory. If we add the transfer of Cercanías, the transfer of El Prat airport and other infrastructures, the enlargement of the staff of the Mossos de Escuadra and the reception of customs surveillance, we could be talking about almost 200,000 million euros. 12,500 million per coup seat. Moreover, they require both parliamentary groups, provoking a fraud of law because they do not meet the requirements. PSOE and PP will look the other way.
The PNV's nuts are always on the rise. It has already suggested to the acting president that with Judge Llarena in the Supreme Court the support of its 5 MPs will be more expensive. He will have to be dismissed even with a promotion.
Meanwhile, Otegui warns that his secret pacts include putting all his imprisoned terrorists on the street and "generously pensioning" those who have reached retirement age, following agreements with the provincial councils and the expansion of Basque in Navarre. Bildu will get some commissions after mediating with Puigdemont.
Thanks to the Andalusian, Castilian-Manchegan, Castilian and Leonese, Riojan, Murcian, Extremaduran, Galician and Madrid socialists, Basque and Catalan separatists will live divinely for the foreseeable future.
Yolanda Díaz, the leader of Sumar, has not bothered to demand her electoral promises (universal inheritance -20,000 euros-, 200 euros a month until the age of majority by birth or 32 hours a week with a salary of 40. No; her thing is to do the dirty work for the radicals by asking that Catalan, Basque and Galician be used in the Congress as it is already done in the Senate. And he rehearses "federal" and "asymmetrical" Spains. A return to cantonalism and a commitment to inequality.
In short: some 50 collaborators of these nationalities receiving succulent bonuses, trips and per diems forever. What language do Otegui, Junqueras and Puigdemont understand each other in? Well, that's just it. Yolanda and her communist partners are the same ones who, paradoxically, prohibit the study of Spanish in the third part of our geography. That is the coherence of the caviar left.
At the same time, blackmailers and blackmailed will obtain the recognition of the "national" sports teams.
An aside: the mayoress of Valencia, María José Catalá, of the PP, has revolutionised her mandate by allowing bilingualism to be possible in the City Council. What a mess!
We continue: Galician and Canarian nationalists have announced that their vote will not be free. Thank goodness that Miguel Ángel Revilla's PRC and Tomás Guitarte's Teruel Existe have lost their seats.
Who will pay for the party? All of us. With more taxes. The aim of Sánchez and his friends is to bend the state. It is a medium-term war. Instability will prevent urgent reforms such as the PHN.
Meanwhile, the price will rise hour by hour. How much will the amnesty for the insurgents cost? And the referendum on self-determination? The Constitution does not allow either of the two secessionist figures. It is prevented by Art. 1, which enshrines "national sovereignty" and Art. 2, which proclaims the "unity" of the homeland. The Socialists will also undertake not to take any law emanating from the regional parliaments of the Basque Country and Catalonia to the Constitutional Court. In other words, they will ensure that the law is not complied with.
Only the never candid legal engineering applied by Conde-Pumpido from the TC could accelerate the process towards a republican, plurinational, federal or confederal Spain.
A request for maximums would complicate the situation of forming a government. And it would lead to a hotter autumn than the one in Gerona these days. The loser is neither an idiot nor suicidal. That is why, after launching the kite, he could pick it up in September and declare himself the victim of a plot - this time by the media, the powerful, the intransigent, the PP and Vox - and declare himself a great patriot by calling new elections to "save Spain".
This guy is capable of anything but abandoning his privileges. After the submission to ERC and Bildu during this gloomy five-year period, everything indicates that the tenant of Waterloo wants to return as a hero in his own presidential Falcon. The enlightened Puigdemont demands the agreements in writing although he denounces that Sánchez "never fulfils what he promises". What a discovery. The infighting between ERC and Junts will further complicate the political, economic and social landscape. At stake is the supremacy for the Generalitat's succulent plate of lentils.
If Sánchez's Calvary, if he manages to re-engage in the Palace, will culminate in the Golgotha of the budgets. This will allow him to learn to breathe under a diving mask until Illa, his saviour, greens up with an absolute majority in the Catalan elections. Then, it will be the reviled PP that will come to his aid to stop, for the time being, the new coup d'état. With a socialist Catalonia, after the mandates of Maragall and Montilla, our "Caesar Imperator" will extend his absolutism to the stars and beyond. His lordship has always been galactic.
Nobody has been able to value in euros, the political repression in Catalonia; that "painless martyrdom" we will never pay for because victimhood is the essence of national-socialism.
The bitter victory
The polls - except for those of José Félix Tezanos for Moncloa - were unable to detect the momentum of the Socialist comeback, the trips back and forth to Brussels to win a seat in Lérida and San Sebastián, the absence of the RTVE debate, the spectacle in Extremadura of María Guardiola Martín, the obstinate attitude of Fernando López Miras in Murcia, the ambiguous negotiation of Jorge Azcón in Aragón and, above all, the rudeness and insults of Jorge Azcón in Aragón, the Extremadura spectacle of María Guardiola Martín, the obstinate attitude of Fernando López Miras from Murcia, Jorge Azcón's negotiating ambiguity in Aragón and, above all, the unnecessary insults and rudeness between Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Santiago Abascal Conde. The secret meeting between popular and voxist leaders has turned out to be another political mistake well exploited by Ferraz and the Goebelsian propaganda factory; it has eroded the possible alternative with a single argument: "the ultra-right is coming"! It could have been easily neutralised: Sanchez represents the coup plotters and terrorists better than anyone else! Sanchismo governs in 38 Catalan municipalities with ERC and in three provincial councils.
Letting fear inoculate a broad sector of society by forgetting the outrages of five years of the darkest government since 1977 has turned out to be the wrong strategy in this blue summer tinged with uncertainty.
To make matters worse, the future president of Aragon sent his spokesperson in the Cortes to sign the agreement that will make alternation possible two and a half months late. Is he so ashamed of the agreement with VOX? The results in Castilla y León, Valencia, the Balearic Islands and Extremadura have been good. If elections were to be repeated in Murcia, the voters of both parties would have to run the leaders into the ground. What a lack of respect for the PSOE's social base! The PP has to define once and for all its relationship with its preferred and almost exclusive partner.
Worst of all, PP and Vox speak of transparency with the same certainty as Dr. Pedro S. Pérez-Castejón, whose wanderings we always have to learn about from the Moroccan press. It is strange that being in Fez he is not received by the Emir of the believers. In secret, of course. Relations with the southern neighbour have always been troubled.
The King's week
We have a king we don't deserve. And there he is, watching time go by, like the Puerta de Alcalá. The acting president has ignored him from the first minute; he has made him wait in several official acts, he has frozen the salary of the Royal Household, he has legislated so that offences against HM and the royal family become an extension of freedom of expression; that is, impunity for criminals.
He has allowed regional leaders to humiliate him and some city councils to declare him persona non grata. Now, the Republicans will try again to stop the King from signing university degrees; a head of state who has not named a single title of nobility; not even Rafa Nadal, Marca España for five lustrums. The great Marquis of Manacor. A king always close to the Spanish people. Our best ambassador, with hardly any missions abroad or at home.
The Catalans do have a king, as Sergio Fidalgo and Antonio Robles have confirmed in a book of the same name, which will be presented this Thursday, the 8th, in Fermoselle (ZA). We will be there.
Dozens of republicans and people on the left, from PCE journalist Regina Farré to former minister José Luis Corcuera, defend the Parliamentary Monarchy against this Popular Front of Judea, which is doing everything it can to break up Spain, now that thirst is transforming our fields into sub-Saharan deserts and the marshes are flooding with despair. Water - the lack of water - should be our most urgent problem, even more than the composition of a new Frankenstein government.
Article 99 empowers the Monarch - one of the few powers he still possesses - to present a candidate to Congress who can be invested with a majority of seats. The most-voted list does not apply here. It is true that on this occasion, the winner of the elections is assured 171 seats with those of Vox and UPN. But they are not enough. The winner is the one who governs.
Given that the representatives of Bildu, ERC, Coalición Galega and Junts will not come to La Zarzuela to report their voting intentions directly, Felipe VI only has Don Pedro's word to convince him that he will have 176 seats. Believing a man who constantly "changes his mind" must not be easy. Sánchez's word is incompatible with the truth. As far as is known, he has not yet congratulated the winner.
The monarch's doubts are reasonable. In this time of drought and fires with gusty Tramontana winds, he has to make a poisoned decision. Neutrality in domestic politics is a loaded weapon of republicanism. Let us hope the decision does not erode the Crown!
Does the PP leader have a legitimate right to defend his candidacy? He should at least be able to try. It is time to present a programme for a country that gives Spaniards a little more hope. Those of us who are pissed off by this government are not enough for a democratic changeover.
It seems incredible, but Don Pedro remains immaculate. All his venial and mortal sins have been forgiven: from pardons for the coup plotters, to the elimination of the crime of sedition and the reduction of sentences for embezzling public funds. He has left the state disarmed so that "they can try the definitive coup again" in Catalonia and the Basque Country at the same time. And for them to get off scot-free.
The refusal of the acting president to meet with the winner of the general elections before the Congress Bureau is formed presages that the Pedro-Alberto relationship remains more broken than ever. Without constitutional loyalty, the two Machadian Spains will continue to freeze our hearts. He took advantage of the letter of reply to Feijóo to put direct pressure on the monarch. A pressure that was as veiled as it was effective. If on Thursday 17, Maritxell Batet is re-elected president of the Lower House, the die is cast. New general elections, now! And to marshal the forces for an alternation of change.
We trust in the King, God save the King!
Antonio REGALADO directs BAHÍA DE ÍTACA in:
