Feijóo opened the first government questions session in Congress of the new political year with this attack. Sánchez, for his part, avoided addressing the issue and challenged the Popular Party leader to face him at the ballot box in 2027. “We will beat them again,” he predicted.
The PP is thus maintaining its strategy of portraying Sánchez as a prime minister blackmailed by the regime of Mohamed VI. Feijóo has in fact gone so far as to claim that Sánchez’s “loyalty” is “compromised” and that Spain will “make him pay” for having “left” its citizens “unprotected”.
The prime minister did not respond to these accusations and focused his speech on the PISA report and the ‘grandchildren’s law’, two issues that Feijóo also raised.
However, in response to repeated accusations from Vox leader Santiago Abascal, he did state that Spain “does not accept blackmail from any country” and that proof that it has nothing to “hide” is that all reports related to the mass entry of 70,000 people from Morocco into Ceuta are being declassified today.
CORRUPTION
Corruption was the other spearhead of Feijóo’s offensive. PSOE manager Ana María Fuentes is appearing before the National Court this morning. The opposition leader said he was convinced that all of Sánchez’s attention would be focused on whether he “answers questions about his party’s financing”.
“Your problem is that your political and legal future depends on too many people remaining silent. If the party manager talks, you’re out. If Ábalos talks, you’re out. If Zapatero talks, you’re out. If Julio Martínez, if Gertrudis, if the director general of the Civil Guard talks, you’re out. And if Morocco talks, you’re out. Your freedom is conditional on many people continuing to remain silent about what they know about you. That is why you are not a free president.”
Feijóo: “Your freedom is conditional on many people continuing to remain silent about what they know about you. That is why you are not a free president”
With all this, Feijóo again asked him “what he would do” if “80,000 people entered Ceuta again tomorrow”, asserting that he is “a president who is incapable of protecting the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy from an aggression permitted or encouraged by Morocco”, but is capable of creating “lists of journalists resembling police files”.
PISA REPORT
The third line of Feijóo’s offensive was the PISA report, which in his view shows how “classrooms across the country are being emptied of knowledge”. This is happening while “the backpacks of Ceuta’s students are being filled with pepper spray”. Feijóo called it “intolerable” that the “degradation” of Sánchez’s “project” is now affecting “children”.
Sánchez acknowledged that the OECD results are “an extraordinary concern”. But not only for Spain, he said, but also for “all Western countries”. He also held PP-led regional governments partly responsible because they have been given the relevant powers but have failed to “implement” more than 400 million euros in inter-regional cooperation funds approved by the central government.
The prime minister also defended the fact that his government had “doubled investment in the Education Ministry compared with the previous Popular Party administration, from 3.2 billion euros to more than 6 billion”, and stressed that the same applies to scholarships, as there are now “more than 1 billion euros to guarantee equal opportunities”.
Finally, Sánchez urged the PP to support the two bills that set student-to-class ratios and prohibit young people under the age of 16 from accessing social media.
