Disloyalty and shame

Seneca said that some men seem great because the pedestal on which they have climbed is also measured, and I believe that this applies to the second vice-president of the Spanish government, Pablo Iglesias, who is perched in a position for which he simply lacks the necessary preparation, loyalty and prudence. Because if he had them, he would not do or say the things he does and says. Cervantes has a beautiful verse according to which "He warns that it is folly, when the roof is made of glass, to take stones in one's hand and throw them at one's neighbour", which is precisely what this man is doing, who seems more intent on destroying than on building, and more intent on separating than on uniting.

Mr. Iglesias has come to the Government supported by an unknown and weak PSOE and on the back of an old-fashioned communist ideology taken from the boot of tragic memories of the last century. He has sworn allegiance to the Constitution and loyalty to the King and makes no secret of his contempt for what he considers to be the legacy of Francoism, nor of his desire to do away with the monarchy and bring in a republic based on Bolivarian principles that he admires so much despite having ruined the country where they have been put into practice. He is therefore a perjurer to begin with.

His ideology led him a few weeks ago to compare Mr Puigdemont, on the run from Spanish justice in Waterloo after being accused of sedition for orchestrating a coup against the constitutional order, with the republican refugees who had to flee after Franco's triumph in the Civil War. In doing so, Mr. Iglesias very unfairly compared someone who lives with every comfort after rising up against a democratic regime, with the exile in very difficult conditions of those who put their lives on the line fighting for freedom. These are words that reveal crass ignorance and very bad faith on the part of those who uttered them.

In recent days, following the disastrous visit to Moscow by the European High Representative, Mr Borrell, Mr Iglesias has taken the side of Moscow against his own country. It happened when Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, annoyed by Borrell's public reference to Navalny, compared him to the leaders of the Catalan Procès who are imprisoned not for their ideas but for their crimes. Spain's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, then came out from Madrid to set the record straight, recalling that not only are there no political detainees in Spain, but that our country belongs to the small group of 23 full democracies in the world according to The Economist, a group of which Russia is certainly not a member.

And this is where the second vice-president of the Spanish government intervened to publicly contradict the minister and point out that "there is no situation of full democratic normality in Spain when the two leaders of the two parties that govern Catalonia, one is in prison and the other in Brussels". It is very disloyal of her to take Russia's side against Spain, it is very clumsy to undermine a minister of her own government in this way (the Russian minister now wonders ironically which of the two she should believe), it is very naughty to contribute in this way to the international disrepute of your own country, and it is very ignorant to compare the sheep with the goats.

I think what has happened is pitiful. It is shameful that this man, who may have other capacities, should be Vice-President of the Spanish Government because he has clearly demonstrated that he is not qualified to do so. But I find the silence of the President of the Government just as bad, because Mr Sánchez should have stopped him, should have called him to order and should have publicly disavowed him while backing his foreign minister, who needs him, in front of the world. Mr Sánchez cannot shirk his responsibility for what Iglesias has said because he is his boss and it is he who appointed him. The silence of the president, which shows his weakness, is shameful, while the clumsy statements of the spokeswoman are simply pathetic, saying that what happened must be framed in the context of the Catalan election campaign. Shameful.
 
Jorge Dezcallar