Last week, the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, described it as an “absolute disgrace” that King Felipe VI took a photograph with Javier Negre. It was the first time a minister publicly criticized the monarch in such terms. However, Puente, far from retracting, has deepened this criticism in the following days: “The head of state I have in my mind would not touch Javier Negre with a stick,” he said yesterday in an interview with Europa Press, justifying this stance by saying that the person in question “is a professional of hoaxes and defamation” and “a harasser of progressive politicians.” “The one who has crossed the red line is not the Government, it is the Royal House,” he added.
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The Popular Party, following these statements, clashed with Puente on Tuesday for “pointing at the Crown.” It was the opposition leader, Alberto Núñez Feijoó, who lamented “having the misfortune of seeing ministers of the Kingdom of Spain behaving in a tavern-like manner and insulting opponents and private citizens.” “Or, even, an unprecedented act, pointing at the Crown,” the popular concluded at an event in Ribadeo (Lugo).
Precisely, Feijóo held this position at an event organized on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo, Prime Minister between 1981 and 1982. The popular, contrasting with current members of the Executive – and implicitly, in particular, with Puente – praised that Calvo-Sotelo, and also his predecessor at La Moncloa, Adolfo Suárez, “were always guided by respect and institutional dignity.”
In this regard, Feijóo referred to the Transition as a “constituent moment of genuine reconciliation” and, in contrast, placed the current situation: a “destituent moment,” in his view. “We suffer a Government that acts against the nation and against the State, occupying it, degrading it, and disarming it,” the popular stated, insisting on this by accusing the Executive of having “initiated a process of breaking and deconstructing the 1978 constitutional system.”
Feijóo censured the Executive which, in his opinion, “governs or misgoverns without parliament, without budgets, and abusing the Royal Decree-Law” – Pedro Sánchez is the president under whose mandates more initiatives of this kind have been approved -. “It is operating a constitutional mutation through the back door and without social majority for it,” the popular leader said about the Government.
“Absent government” in Ceuta
Feijóo wondered “what Calvo-Sotelo or Suárez would have done” in the face of an “unprecedented situation” like the one, he said, Ceuta is experiencing after 80,000 migrants irregularly entered on July 30, and several thousand still remain there. “An absent, inert, and indifferent government to the interests, security, integrity, and sovereignty of Spaniards,” is the definition the popular gave of Sánchez’s Executive in contrast. “We must not take this government’s actions lightly, no matter how often they seem ridiculous,” he concluded, reproaching the president for the video he published days after the Ceuta influx, recommending songs.
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