Government control session in Congress, opening minute: “Third world”, “regrettable”, “useless”, “incompetent”, “irresponsible”, “Ali Baba’s cave”, “seven dead later, zero responsibilities…” Miguel Tellado, number two of the PP, in all his fullness. Opposite, the third vice president of the Government, questioned about last year’s blackout. Sara Aagesen reacts and resorts to a recent message from the PP leader about Donald Trump’s apocalyptic threats:
—I think Mr. Feijóo was referring to you when he said more common sense and less brutality.
Tellado never backs down. And he returns with the deaths in incidents that occurred during the blackout hours:
—Those deaths are your responsibility and that of Beatriz Corredor [president of Red Eléctrica]. Leave before they fire you.
Tellado’s to Aegesen was certainly not the only demand for resignations in the Government heard this Wednesday in Congress. Each parliamentary session loses count of the ministers whose heads the PP requests. The Transport minister, Óscar Puente, was called for again, with the entire popular bench shouting, while his deputy Eduardo Carazo reinforced him by holding up a sign from his seat.
The deaths linked to the blackout were not the only ones the Feijóo party threw against the Government on a day when the Chamber was supposed to be relaxed due to the absence of Pedro Sánchez and the two vice presidents who follow him in rank. The Populars again loaded the Executive with the 46 dead in the Adamuz train accident. As a finishing touch, they added the women murdered this year by their partners.
The relatives of the Adamuz victims had come to Congress, where they held a protest gathering in front of the entrance. They coincided with another group of those affected by the Valencia flash flood. These occupied the guest gallery wearing t-shirts against “Mazón’s immunity”. The PP, logically, took care not to stir that well. Nor did the Government, which has more than once succumbed to the necrophilic counterattack.
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The visit of the relatives revived the debate about the train accident after some weeks quite shelved in Congress. Puente was asked by up to three Popular deputies. The first of them, the Malagan Elías Bendodo, went in other directions: the cut of the AVE line to his city. Bendodo’s unusually tempered tone surprised, as he offered his “outstretched hand” to the minister to seek temporary solutions. Puente was not very willing and interpreted the invitation differently: “We enter hand in hand with you into the Andalusian electoral campaign…”
The moment of respite lasted little. Bendodo passed the baton to his colleague Mirian Guardiola and the fire was unleashed at will to blame the Government for the Adamuz tragedy. After her, Carazo hammered it home. There Puente was the one who dived deep into the Andalusian electoral dispute, far from the kind words between the central and regional governments, of the PP, during the days after the accident. The minister read a letter from a group of victims denouncing the performance of the emergency services dependent on the autonomous community. Which gave him grounds to demand explanations from the president of the Junta, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, for these “very serious negligence”.
Jaime de los Santos is considered a centrist voice within the PP. The Madrid deputy usually proudly shows his homosexual militancy. At the same time, he seems to have taken a liking to the more thunderous speeches during control sessions, in which he seeks to overwhelm the Minister of Equality, Ana Redondo. De los Santos contributed his part to fatten the grim tally that the opposition places in the Government’s column. In this case, the 16 women murdered in the last four months in episodes of gender violence. The deputy began by pointing to the highest: he called Sánchez “sexist” and “tyrant”, while accusing him of “exercising institutional violence”. Immediately he took on the minister:
—While they were being murdered, what were you doing? Were you quietly in your office? Or were you covering up the president’s shame?
Redondo considered the deputy’s words an “absolute shame” and an “insult to the murdered women”. As the matter was already taking a personal turn, she reproached him for not answering her phone calls to offer “privileged information” and for spending his time “from talk show to talk show and on tour to promote his novel”.
In less thorny terrain, the Minister of the Presidency and Justice, Félix Bolaños, defended his right to criticize judges’ decisions, although without insisting on reproaches to the one who just prosecuted the president’s wife. The PP made a timid foray into a problem it does not often deal with, housing. Or so it seemed from the tone of the question. Because the truth is that deputy Sergio Sayas spent his time talking about Koldo, Ábalos’s prostitutes, and immigrant regularization. The minister questioned, Isabel Rodríguez, turned to Feijóo to make a request:
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—Provide your party with a spokesperson who knows about housing.
