Alberto Núñez Feijóo opened the political season this Saturday with a two-pronged offensive to clarify the Government’s actions during the Ceuta crisis. The PP will demand the appearance of the CNI director in the Senate to find out what information the Executive had before the massive entry from Morocco and, in addition, will join the case opened in the National Court to investigate what happened.
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“The Spanish people have the right to know the whole truth,” demanded the PP president during the traditional start of the popular course in the Carballeira de San Xusto, in Cerdedo-Cotobade (Pontevedra). And he took advantage of the contradictions that arose within the Government about prior warnings from intelligence services to directly attack the Executive.
“The Minister of Defense says that the intelligence services informed the Police, the Civil Guard, and the Government, and the Government says that the Minister is not telling the truth,” Feijóo countered. “It is obvious that someone is lying, although I believe they are all lying”, he added.
For this reason, the popular party wants the head of the CNI to detail before the Upper House “when they warned, what information they conveyed, and what the Government knew before the invasion.” And the offensive will not be limited to the parliamentary field. “There will be consequences,” Feijóo warned, before announcing that the PP will join the National Court case so that “those responsible for the abandonment have to answer to Justice.”
The opposition leader accused the Executive of having reacted late to a crisis that, in his opinion, required an immediate and coordinated response. “This country has everything to work except a Government that makes it work,” he summarized. Because, according to his diagnosis, while citizens, the Security Forces and Corps, and the Army fulfilled their duties, “the people fulfill their duty and the Government fails theirs”.
Feijóo especially praised the forces deployed in Ceuta, whom he exonerated from any responsibility for the difficulties experienced during the crisis. “They have fulfilled”, he said. The problem, he added, lies with those who “do not provide them with means or legal coverage and leave them exposed.”
For the PP president, what happened in the autonomous city is not an isolated episode but the latest manifestation of an Executive he considers exhausted. “Ceuta is not an exception. Ceuta is the symptom of a collapsed Government,” he assured, before placing the border crisis in the same frame as “widespread corruption”, parliamentary blockage, the absence of new Budgets, and the deterioration of public services.
He also did not limit the responsibilities to the PSOE. Feijóo pointed to Sánchez’s parliamentary partners, whom he accuses of now trying to distance themselves from the Executive after having supported it during the legislature. “There are no heroes or villains in sanchismo,” he concluded. “They are all villains”, he added.
And he later elevated the defense of Ceuta to the level of territorial integrity. The autonomous city, he defended, cannot be considered “a second-class territory,” a “periphery,” or a “bargaining chip.” “Ceuta and Melilla are as Spanish as Madrid, Barcelona, or Málaga. They are Spain”, he said.
Feijóo will travel to Ceuta on September 2 and has called on citizens to participate that same evening, at 8:00 p.m., in the gatherings convened in front of town halls across Spain. “They need to feel supported,” he explained, before conveying a commitment to the people of Ceuta: “We will not abandon you,” he concluded.
“CERTIFY THEIR DEATH”
Starting from Ceuta, Feijóo broadened the focus to make the crisis part of his general diagnosis about the end of the legislature. And he did so by already politically writing off the project of Pedro Sánchez. “Sanchismo is already finished. Now it is time to certify its death at the polls,” he expressed.
The PP president has dubbed the coming months as “the political season of change” and has placed his party in an electoral position ahead of months in which there will be municipal elections, regional elections in much of Spain, and, as he predicted, also general elections.
“I am not satisfied with winning. I commit to deserving to win,” he emphasized. Feijóo does not only aspire to repeat the victory of the 2023 general elections but to expand it to obtain a sufficiently large majority to govern “with the necessary force so that those who have lost cannot govern.”
Supported by the president of the Xunta, Alfonso Rueda; the PP secretary general, Miguel Tellado, and Mariano Rajoy, Feijóo has presented that possible change of Government as the beginning of “the greatest reconstruction since the Transition.”
