For Alberto Núñez Feijóo, Pedro Sánchez is a “traitor” to Europe. This is how the leader of the PP bluntly described him during his speech at an informational meeting held two days after the approval of the extraordinary regularization of immigrants in the Council of Ministers. “The main problem of our current foreign policy is no longer that it is being done behind the backs of the General Courts, where we have always decided it,” criticized the leader of the Popular Party. “It is no longer that it is manipulated to please minorities or to divert attention from domestic problems. It is that decisions are being made that betray the basic pillars of Europeanism,” Feijóo concluded at a forum organized by El Español early this Thursday. There, the president of the Popular Party also revived his proposal to guarantee the “right to error” and not sanction the self-employed or other taxpayers who commit a first administrative breach in tax declarations.
Among those “decisions” he considers contrary to the “pillars of Europeanism,” the PP leader first mentioned the already effective extraordinary regularization of immigrants. “It goes against the greater control agreed upon by all European Union countries,” noted the leader of the Popular Party, who on Wednesday further hardened his stance on the regulation. In the corridors of Congress, after the control session, Feijóo attacked a “bulk” regularization and insisted on linking it to crime, despite the royal decree stating that cases will be evaluated individually and that residence will not be granted to foreigners who represent “a threat to public order, public safety, or public health,” which will also be verified “through the check of the absence of criminal records and the assessment of the corresponding police report.”
However, this Thursday, upon leaving the forum where he spoke, Feijóo insisted on the same idea: “If a government cannot distinguish between criminal and police records, it should not be part of that government, much less the spokesperson,” he said about Elma Sáiz, who is also the minister of the department and accuses the Popular Party of lying about this matter. “That the government accepts regularizing a person who has entered irregularly even with police records is unprecedented,” he reiterated.
Secondly, Feijóo argues that the Executive places itself outside the foundations of the European Union due to attacks against Judge Peinado regarding the prosecution of the president’s wife, Begoña Gómez. Specifically, the statements made during the press conference following the Council of Ministers this Tuesday, just hours after the order was issued that leaves Gómez one step away from the dock. “The rule of law has been attacked, charging against the independence of the judiciary from the government (…). And it has also been done in voce and in writing,” he emphasized.
Finally, the opposition leader considers that Sánchez also violates European values due to his recent trip to China. “He defended in China a geostrategic approach radically opposed to that agreed upon by European partners,” Feijóo added. In line with China’s interests, Sánchez proposed on Monday to Xi Jinping that “the West must give up part of its representation quotas” so that “the past does not suffocate the future.” The PP leader referred to these words this Thursday: “A leader loyal to Europe would never defend the retreat of the West. What the West must do is expand its values. That is what we true pacifists defend, not the fake ones.”
Right to error
During his speech at the forum, Feijóo made several promises to the self-employed that his government would implement if it reaches La Moncloa after the elections scheduled for 2027. Among the measures, which he also demands from Sánchez’s Executive, the leader of the Popular Party revived his proposal to guarantee the “right to error” already included in the PP’s electoral program for the 2023 general elections and in the political report approved last July during the party’s national congress. “The government must restore trust by recognizing the right to error of the self-employed and other taxpayers. So that the first administrative breach is not punishable and collaboration is rewarded,” he defended. Feijóo did include a new proposal aimed at the self-employed: a “registry of businesses for transfer that allows identifying opportunities, especially in strategic sectors and rural areas.”
In the barrage of attacks against the Executive, Feijóo also referred to the mask trial that began this April in the Supreme Court. “No one can guarantee that there is no corruption within the government. I am a guarantee that a clean government will be restored in Spain,” he defended. “Spain is not resigned to having its name associated with this stage of decline. I am convinced that Spain can awaken, that our best pages can be written,” he concluded.
