“Here he already has 40 votes,” said Gran Wyoming glancing sideways at the El Intermedio audience devoted to Pedro Sánchez. Sánchez referred to the host as Wyoming the whole time. I think many people already call him that, without the Gran, although close friends know him as Chechu. But the joke, and the serious part, is to call him Gran Wyoming. “Look, Gran Wyoming…”, Sánchez should have said for his speech about Ceuta (shielded, circular, tired) to take on a tragicomic tone. “Could it happen again that 80,000 people gather at the border and try to cross it?” “Look, Gran Wyoming, I don’t know about Wyoming, but in Spain…”
The question was asked twice by Gran Wyoming (“how do I address him?”, he wondered in the opening monologue, “do I bark at him?”) and twice Sánchez neither said yes nor no. Sánchez is generally against strong statements because, it is true that when he made them years ago, he had to qualify them so much afterward that the effort is no longer worth it. Better not to answer anything and move forward. “What has been done wrong?” Sandra Sabatés asked him. “I wouldn’t say something has been done wrong or not,” the president began. He used a fascinating expression to talk about the need for normality in Ceuta: it must be achieved in the “largest brief space of time” (I don’t know if it’s used correctly or not, it’s fascinating precisely because of that).
When Gran Wyoming mentioned the warnings from intelligence services, Sánchez said they were not taken lightly. “There was attention and vigilance,” like when one is truly curious about something, like, since we started the movie, we finish it. Also, and this is important, Sánchez warned about the effect of rumors spreading on social networks about the benefits Spain offered if someone arrived by swimming (as if this were a contest). The president put his finger on the root of the problem, inequality in one country and another, and glossed over the other: Morocco’s responsibility in the crisis and Spain’s lack of communication to prevent it.
Sabatés and Gran Wyoming gave way via video to the most aggressive questions. A man from Ceuta told Sánchez what he owed to Morocco, that he was “scared.” Sánchez showed a very subtle but detectable condescension with him that consisted of smiling calmly while the other spoke. As if, when the gentleman finished the question, the president was going to ask for applause for the effort.
They asked him for an early election, they reminded him. And they will ask for it next year, Sánchez said because he has no doubt, he warned, that progressives will win the elections. That was indeed an answer. Maybe because he was talking about the future, which is always a more comfortable place than Ceuta: in the future nothing has happened yet, so it can be perfectly explained. Gran Wyoming listened without stretching his suspenders.
At the same time, a giant screen in Ceuta paid for by businessmen was broadcasting Vivas’s interview on El Hormiguero. Inflatable castles for children, storytellers, discounts on drinks, and a dj were advertised. Strictly speaking, they set up a giant screen not to listen to Vivas.
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