The wall
Since yesterday we have all been a plurinational Spain. No one can explain how to dispel this uncertainty. The Transition of '78 has been mortally wounded. One hundred and six days after the general elections and after twelve hours of debates in the Congress of Deputies, Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón approved his 23-J plebiscite and achieved his first objective: to be legally and legitimately re-elected President of the Government. It was 13:15 on Thursday 16 November.
The lions bunkered like Zelenski's presidential palace in Kiev. 1,600 riot police for dozens of angry taxpayers. Paratroopers from Alcalá, a hundred GEOS and the UME were missing because the safety of our tribune was in danger. Like Puigdemont's in Waterloo.
A second progressive Executive -more progressive green, LGTBI, feminist and sustainable than ever- has been consecrated by 179 seats. The opposition (PP, Vox and UPN) only managed 171.
He has passed the investiture with flying colours. The legislature will be an ordeal for Sánchez, but it will be hell for citizens and taxpayers.
Greening Sanchezism will have destabilising economic consequences because Yolanda and Pedro from the blue bench have pledged that while they are in government "the rich will pay much more taxes to favour the weakest. The weakest must be Puigdemont, Rovira, Turull, Junqueras, Mas, Borràs and Alay).
The 15th Legislature has been described as the "time of joy". Next week, once the euphoria is over with the appointment of the new Council of Ministers, the days of wine and roses will begin. Sánchez has erected a (democratic?) wall dividing Spanish society between progressives and reactionaries.
The coup plotters, separatists, separatists, philo-etarras, socialists, communists and nationalists (them, naturally) are the bloc of progress. Those of democratic sovereignty, as in the former GDR and today's Venezuela. The rest, the reactionary bloc (extreme right-wingers and Catalans, the centrist UPN), defenders of national sovereignty, will be interned in barracks on the other side of the Berlin Wall, the wall of Pedrín, (Bustos dixit).
Don Pedro the Magnanimous is not attracted by bridges or windows, like those designed on euro banknotes; he prefers walls, which are not exactly a symbol of tolerance. Example: the Great Wall of China. To be understood: from now on there will be first and second class citizens, as the leader of the PP denounced.
Equality has been decapitated with the stroke of a pen. Plurinational Spain was discovered by a certain Maragall with his "asymmetrical federalism". More privileges. The rich richer against the poor poorer.
Party by party
Never has a session begun with an Amnesty Law in the Registry, imposed by the most radical partners: ERC, Junts, Bildu and PNV. Yolanda's supreme docility contrasts with the five rebels with a cause and forgotten Podemos who may be left without a seat in the polls if they do not "push" hard enough. Yes, they can. The mourners Belarra and Montero lament the fact that Yolanda has not sent them a WhatsApp for months. And this telephone scorn from the Doña will have its revenge in the short and medium term.
This new beginning is born as a bewildered country, not broken (yet) but fractured. Never before had the nationalist mafia demanded that before an investiture an Amnesty Law written by themselves be registered, which will release hundreds of coup plotters, terrorists and collaborators of the process without charge or trace of their criminal activities. All of them to the street! With criminal, administrative and accounting pardon. A clean slate until the definitive coup d'état is carried out. A disarmed state.
The president's "generosity" has no limits or values or principles; the tenant of La Moncloa has paid cheques in advance to get this far and the rest of the price - 100 billion in the first year - will be paid "game by game", month by month, with four "companions" of the VAR who will examine the Spanish Government abroad every three months. Nobody trusts anybody any more. What a humiliation!
The blackmail can be prolonged until 2027. "After the amnesty, we will force him to go all the way to the referendum on secession", threatened Gabriel Rufián and Miriam Noguera, spokespersons for ERC and Junts, respectively.
One thing is the investiture and another the legislature. The serious thing is that it has cost a lot to put together this majority of the pro-civil war Popular Front and, therefore, it will be very difficult to disarm this business in the next four years.
It is not going to be easy to manage this situation of permanent and irreversible instability. The Decree Law will be the most suitable formula (we would start with the authoritarian decree number 139) of the mature emperor Tiberius, who dwells and takes his solace on the left bank of the Manzanares.
Three extremely important details in the rigged debate did not go unnoticed. The first, the guffaws of the manichean, laughing his head off at the president of the PP who "gave up being president" because he did not want to; the only candidate who did not want to be president..." (Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha) and so on up to three times; a mockery unbecoming of a democrat, but exclusive of an autocrat with the airs of a dictator.
His comrades applauded Padrino like his hitmen applauded Pablo Escobar. I am not president," said Feijóo, "because I do not sell myself or the Spaniards".
The second was just as serious: he accused his brother of corruption - the political heir to the Eres and the Tito Berni case - of the presidency of the Community of Madrid, although the case, brought by the PSOE, was dismissed months ago in the Supreme Court and in the European Court of Justice. Sánchez knew this, but he threw his hate-filled and vengeful dart to hurt Isabel D. Ayuso. The response has already gone viral on the networks and in the Madrid Assembly. "I like fruit", a great slogan from winter to spring.
The third detail was pathetic: the emperor Tiberius - the Roman god who always blamed his mistakes on his soldiers - was talking about his achievements in five years in office and explaining the story of his success: dialogue, reunion, harmony... and then Fidel called, I mean "the fugitive Puchi" from Brussels and ordered him to read a text in which he made a commitment, after an unconfessable recess by President Armengol. Sánchez, demure, changed the dialogue and the reunion and read the golpista's full text: "I will comply with the negotiation".
Sánchez is a puppet whose strings are pulled with the dexterity of Prague artists by his anti-Spanish partners. He is a man mortgaged for life. A president too weak to move forward. He will walk forward, yes, but downwards and on his knees.
It was enough to listen to the substance and form used against Feijóo, Abascal and Catalá (UPN) to recognise the supremacist in him. His constant allusions to the right, the extreme right, the ultra-right and the Navarrese defectors who left the party to continue defending his liberal ideas, contrasts with the servility with which he treated the "hooded" Bildu, the ERC and Junts overseers, the unknown Galician, the disdain for Podemos and the amorous requiebros to a Yolanda-Dulcinea in love with her lord Don Quixote. There has never been a more rebellious Dulcinea than the Toledo actress Valle Hidalgo. I note.
No explanations
The candidate did not explain what we expected: the change of attitude from Amnesty (no) unconstitutional to Amnesty (yes) within the Magna Carta. Felipe's famous dilemma with NATO. "No for starters, and no for leavers". But he had the courage to put it to a referendum. And he won it. The general interest is to save his skin and buy 48 seats for his investiture.
Sánchez spent the best part of his time criminalising the PP for being linked to VOX and for pursuing all the progressive achievements of the last five years in the towns and autonomous communities that were won on 28-M. The story is false, but it doesn't matter.
Transparency and progressiveness against barbarism and fascism. Divide and rule. Except for the Iron Curtain, we are all Nazis and reactionaries. Outside the Judean Front there is no salvation.
He announced the usual propagandist claims to sell us the lie that the Pact of Tinell is still in force twenty years later; that the Transition is over and that we must return to the Second Republic of Largo Caballero, Prieto and Negrín. A little more and it takes us back to 13 September 1923 with the proclamation of the Dictablanda of the "punisher" (of beauties after his widowhood), General Primo de Rivera.
Curiously enough, the best allies of that bourgeois dictatorship were the corrupt Largo and Prieto. The two men who six years later led us first to the Republic and then, in 1936, directly to war by leading a Popular Front, similar to the one this autumn, opposed to the moderate theses of Julián Besteiro, who reproached them: "You are not even sure that you are going to win the war...".
This was the atmosphere of civil war that pervaded the Chamber throughout the debate. Puente's shadow was still too long. The Pact of Tinell was reissued yesterday. No water for the PP and its associates. No alternation to the Madrid Ottoman. The denial of democracy. Sanchista's wall is built with the materials of the Law of Ice: the rejection of the adversary, disdain, hatred and revenge.
The discourse of method
Faced with presidentialist demagogy, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who at the end of September presented his candidacy for the presidency without achieving his dream and detailed his "country programme", spent his time fighting the real danger: the Amnesty Law. He psychologically undressed Mr. Sánchez who had to listen to all the inconsistencies of a biography full of oceanic lies, which he broke down to his "no is no", now, with the contradiction of the "yes is yes" to the constitutional Amnesty. "I would not be able to sleep if I govern with Podemos". "I will never agree with Bildu, I tell you once, five or twenty times: I will never agree with Bildu". "I will bring Puigdemont to justice". Don Alberto insisted: "You plagiarised your doctoral thesis". I stay here because the cotton wool of the newspaper archive always uncovers impostors. Those who deceive and lie without blushing, like Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón, to everyone, everywhere and all the time.
His speech was very well crafted and structured. He spoke of massive fraud against citizens for evading the amnesty in the campaign and denounced that this government "before being born, has perpetrated the biggest attack on the rule of law in our democratic history". He left the debate disappointed, as did many Spaniards who followed it on radio and television.
The censorious president
The most urgent reform of the Rules of Procedure is to deny the President of Congress the power to censor all or part of a Member's speech. Months ago, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo was censured for saying what Pablo Iglesias had revealed: that her father was a terrorist. The incredible thing is that she appealed to the Constitutional Court and lost. She then won it in the courts in Zamora, but her sentence was erased from the Journal of Sessions.
On Wednesday, after an impeccable speech, Santiago Abascal said from the rostrum that "a coup d'état was taking place with the Amnesty Law in the Registry. The president urged him to withdraw this expression, he refused and, of his own accord, decided to delete it from the Journal.
Abascal opted to leave the Chamber with his 33 loyal followers on his way to the protest nights in Ferraz, but not before anathematizing the PP if the Senate Bureau admits the controversial Amnesty Law to the Senate. Can he avoid it? Vox is in disarray. At the end of the debate, its young spokesperson insisted that the investiture was illegal and illegitimate. Then they complain that their militants and sympathisers abandon them.
Freedom of expression cannot be curtailed for anyone, least of all for a representative of national sovereignty. Thanks to this, in the Diarios de Sesiones of the last century we can find the death threats made by Largo Caballero to Antonio Maura and by La Pasionaria to members of the Council of Ministers and to the head of the opposition.
Taking advantage of this, the Bureau should urgently reform the time allotted to the political groups. It gives the same time (30 minutes) to each group, whether they have 137, 33, 32, 7, 6, 5 or the 3 of the mixed group. And also for allusions to the party. In this debate, the PP was questioned by the candidate, Sumar, Junts, Bildu and ERC. It was unable to respond to the threats of all the "revolutionary progressivism".
The candidate's time is unlimited and the others' is limited. Add one minute for each deputy or for every five deputies and the time and opportunities will be balanced. The current spectacle, Rules of Procedure in hand, is a lynching of the right-wing parties.
The Popular Front
The coalition government is coordinating well. All praise, even when there are disagreements. They swallow, then it will last four years. Yolanda Díaz has learned more in her experience of the summandos than in her entire trade unionist life. Her favourite word is not freedom, equality, democracy, ethics or austerity. Her favourite word is rights.
He is a global rights factory. Social, labour, feminist, LGTBIQ, environmental, sustainable, agricultural, livestock, self-employed, pedestrian, territorial, plurinational, family, artistic rights... Rights without duties, naturally. Neither she nor her favourite candidate have ever once mentioned the concept of duty. It is clear that they have never read Mahatma Ghandi: "For every right, a duty".
Her speech was as deep as emptiness - thank you, Allen, Woody Allen. A rallying woman of second-rate regional preference.
The harshness of Puigdemont's disciple Miriam Noguera's speech was brilliant. The best speech next to that of the popular leader. No concessions. They do not trust Sánchez and they are not going to be fooled by the master of lies that always give him votes and more votes. It is an oratory piece to study in the Faculties of Political Science. Blunt. Hand of steel in kid gloves... Offensive and effective.
Sánchez's face, as he pressed his earpiece to his ear, was a poem. Tremble after having laughed! as we learnt in La Codorniz. It embarrassed the current president. The convergent pujolinos are no longer satisfied with 3%. They want to keep the lion's share of the spoils of the pirate war until they pay back the wrongs of ERC.
Rufián knows that he has the president always in his sights. He has already fooled him enough, but he is training to take revenge. Even Barça will end up benefiting from the mafia law of Amnesty for the Negreira case.
The PNV goes to mushrooms in autumn and finds the Rolex. Their chameleonism is as eternal as the Vatican. They defended the Second Republic in Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya, but simultaneously supported Franco in Álava. They surrendered to Mussolini's soldiers in Santoña, I believe, and offered to be a colony of Hitler in Spain. They spied for Washington and London without knowing English. They are unbelievable. The grandchildren of the racist Sabino reconverted into social-democratic progressives. They will end up governing with Otegui in the spring.
I got up early to listen to the one with the "hooded votes". Another saleswoman of rights without duties. But the aspirant did listen to her when she spoke of this being the Legislature of plurality. If they squeeze this president who buys everything, the ETA members will enter the amnesty that will benefit the criminals of the process, they will obtain the recognition of Euskalerría as a nation and they will reach the end of the term, the integration of Navarre into the Basque Country and independence on the same day as Catalonia.
Pedro S. Pérez-Castejón has lit a fuse that will start a great fire in a country without water. Patxi López made a speech on the same wavelength as his boss, a war-civil war speech.
The bad guys do wrong because they can. And the presidents, from their fourth year onwards, have let go of the friends who helped them get to the top, and now the new ones and those who have been recalled only tell him what the boss wants to hear.
Resistance and the street
There is no doubt that we are facing the most difficult moment of our democracy. Spain has become polarised. A divisive time. Stability will be complex. The president's resistance manual has served him well until now because he controlled everyone; now he is a puppet controlled by Spain's greatest enemies. He is tied to seven sides by pacts with criminals and by a law of ignominy, which the European Parliament will debate on the 22nd to verify the quality of our democracy.
I do not believe that a political animal with such an amoral and unprincipled democratic trajectory can lead us to a good time. The risk he has taken is suicidal. I wish him well. For our sake.
Businessmen warn against investing in Spain. Judges and prosecutors fear that the totalitarian drift will end up assassinating Montesquieu in the back. Without division of powers there is neither freedom nor equality nor democracy. I have already written that Amnesty is corruption.
A deified man like Sánchez-Tiberio, who fears nothing, loves nothing and no one except power. He is a dangerous leader. He has taken on nationalist victimhood, but that is no longer valid. Alberto Núñez Feijóo was the first to congratulate him after winning the vote. It is worth remembering what he said to him: "It is a mistake and you are responsible".
People are fed up of being deceived and of being kept in the dark about the real pacts. Decent people will continue to take to the streets for dignity. Spain is not for sale. Nor does it surrender. See you this Saturday, at 12 o'clock, in Cibeles. Remember it yourself and remind others.
Antonio Regalado directs BAHÍA DE ITACA at:
aregaladorodriguez.blogspot.com