The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez intervenes during the control session of the Government. /
The President of the Government regrets that his work is not recognized while the opposition and allies criticize his inaction in the face of rising prices that are suffocating families, companies and workers
Pedro Sánchez has never been so alone. This Wednesday’s control session in Congress revealed to what extent the chief executive is facing what is probably the most critical moment of the legislature. With the same tone of censorship and urgency, the opposition and parliamentary allies criticized the fact that measures are not already being taken to cushion the impact of inflation aggravated by the war in Ukraine while protests and demonstrations of discontent accumulate, and charged against the turn given by unilaterally to the historical position of Spain in the Western Sahara conflict.
The President of the Government and the Vice Presidents Nadia Calviño and Teresa Ribera once again turned against the attacks, as victims of unfair treatment. The Executive has been airing its frustration for days because the efforts already made are not recognized – the reduction of taxes on electricity and tolls on electro-intensive electricity adopted last September and recently extended until June 30 or the Royal Decree approved on last December after a negotiation with the carriers to, among other things, oblige by contract to review the price of transport in the event of variations in the price of fuel from the moment of contracting until the effective performance of the transport – nor their interest in making a plan based on European decisions and not on national ‘patches’.
The head of the Executive cools down the possibility of an understanding with Feijóo and affirms that “seen what has been seen” there is hardly any difference between the new leader of the PP and Pablo Casado
On Tuesday, in successive appearances after the Board of Spokespersons in the Lower House, the members of the investiture, from the minority government party, United We Can, to Esquerra, Más País, Compromís or EH-Bildu, already expressed their concern about the lack of government reaction to a scenario that threatens the economy of families and workers and that, they warned, may end up taking the Executive itself ahead. This Wednesday some of them abounded in the idea with some criticisms that, in the merely formal, are not far from those raised by the PP, Citizens or Vox but they do in the background.
“Military in Utility”
The usual allies of the Executive are suspicious of the “great country agreement” that Sánchez defends and allege that the measures proposed by the right-wing parties, fundamentally tax cuts, are not the solution. United We Can insist on “building a new social shield” financed, among other things, with a tax on large electricity companies, and on measures such as freezing rents. The leader of Más País, Íñigo Errejón, argued that it is obvious that “when you want, you can.” “It has taken only one month of war,” he criticized, “for there to be talk of increasing military spending.” And the ERC spokesman, Gabriel Rufián, appealed to all the “lefts”: “We have to stop being military exclusively in morale and start being military also in utility,” he said. You have to cap prices, you have to publicly control electricity companies and above all you have to stop talking about taxes on the poor and talk about taxes on the rich because that way the party of the rich will begin to suffer.
The Executive rejects for the moment the new rate for electric companies. And Sánchez revolted against Rufián’s approach. “His speech -he criticized- is the one that feeds the extreme right because he does not recognize what we are doing.” Nor does it seem that the Government is willing to handle the situation with a deflation of personal income tax or tax reductions such as those required by the PP and Cs, despite having promised to study them at the Conference of Presidents held two weeks ago in La Palma. But the president avoided saying so openly.
The truth is that, after having opened a window of understanding with the leader ‘in pectore’ of the popular, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, this Wednesday he hinted that he sees it as complicated. «They have been following the same argument for two years -spokeswoman Cuca Gamarra ugly-; ‘Spain has a great problem called Pedro Sánchez and a great solution, which is Pablo Casado’. But after two years with the rattle they get rid of that great solution and replace it with something else. We can think that perhaps Pablo Casado was not such a great solution and having seen what has been seen and heard what has been heard, the only thing I can deduce is that this great solution is exactly the same as the previous one ».
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.