Alberto Núñez Feijóo has today passed on the pressure to present a motion of no confidence against the Government and has passed it on to the partners of the progressive Executive. “The partners have to make a move,” emphasized the leader of the PP this Wednesday when asked if he is willing to present a motion to remove Pedro Sánchez from his position following the indictment of former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Feijóo urges the allies to stop “supporting the corruption” of the Executive, and makes it clear that he will not move until he sees water in the pool, that is, until he is convinced that the motion could succeed, something he currently believes is not possible. “I will do everything possible to change the Government when I believe the time has come,” emphasized the opposition leader also this morning in an informal conversation with journalists in Congress, while stressing that he does not believe that moment has arrived.
The right and far-right are pressuring Feijóo to consider a motion of no confidence against Pedro Sánchez after maintaining, as he did today in his face-to-face against the president in the control session, that the entire Government is riddled with corruption. “We are governed by corrupt people and I am going to take care of cleaning all this up,” Feijóo stated from the podium, which leads to him being asked repeatedly if that means he will try to oust Sánchez from power with the only parliamentary instrument at his disposal.
But the leader of the PP reaffirms that this is not the time to present a motion of no confidence against the Prime Minister, because he does not have the numbers and losing it, he believes, would strengthen Sánchez. “We have been right. A year ago there were people pushing me to make a motion of no confidence to confirm the Government, you will understand that is quite childish,” he stressed today in response to journalists’ questions.
However, Feijóo leaves all options open for the future, because he cannot rule out that the partners will move in the face of new “judicial milestones,” sources from his direct team indicate, and because it is also a way to unsettle the Government and put more pressure on it over the investigation into the former socialist president, which has caused immense shock on the left. That is why he uses the formula that “when I believe the time has come” he will move. But that moment, PP leadership sources insist, is not now.
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And it is not, they believe in the PP, because the Government partners continue to support the president and are not willing to promote a no-confidence motion against him. That is why Feijóo urges them to “make a move.” “The current situation is unprecedented and I reiterate: the partners have to make a move. The same partners who removed the PP from Government in 2018 [due to the Gürtel case sentence, which condemned the PP as a beneficiary] today have the same reasons, raised to the nth power, to bring down the Government. If this is so, it is evident that there can be a change of Government. If the partners continue to be accomplices of corruption, the partners have to answer for this,” he stressed in statements to journalists in El Escorial (Madrid).
The leader of the PP does not even take the step of directly pressuring Junts per Catalunya, the only party along with Vox with which he has coincided in several votes in Congress and which does claim to have withdrawn parliamentary support from the Government. Instead, he has addressed the spokesperson of ERC, Gabriel Rufián, with whom he is ideologically at odds, in what seems more a way to wear down his political adversaries due to their possible contradictions than to really seek support to oust Sánchez. “Today Rufián was tearing his clothes. Mr. Rufián and the partners are the ones supporting corruption and a corrupt Government. In the PP we have the obligation to do everything possible to change the Government, but it is time for this very question to be answered by the partners,” Feijóo highlighted. “There are currently ten indictments, one of them the financing of the PSOE, another about Sánchez’s brother, about his wife, the Leire case, the Ábalos case… What more is needed for the partners to answer their voters?” he challenged them.
Despite his caution, Feijóo raises the tension and grants the utmost seriousness to the political moment following Zapatero’s indictment. “The Spanish political situation is unbearable, we have never experienced a situation like this, we have never seen a former Prime Minister indicted by the National Court for very serious crimes, and what is more serious is that those crimes could not have been committed without the Council of Ministers,” he considered today. “We are facing facts that affect a former Prime Minister, allegedly responsible for several crimes, and with a direct connection to the Council of Ministers,” he insisted. But, again, all the pressure he receives from the Vox leader, Santiago Abascal, who asks him what more is needed for him to present a motion of no confidence, Feijóo passes it on to the Government allies. “I have the obligation to do everything I can, everything in my power, to change this situation, it is the partners who have to answer this very question.”
