Ángel Collado
The economic crisis and the change of president in the PP have turned the national political landscape upside down, with a head of government on the defensive, engaged in another image campaign, and a new head of the opposition who is trying to take the initiative to seek support or the approval of the business world and the trade unions.
Pedro Sánchez, in the doldrums according to all the polls, returns to the less friendly television channels to relaunch himself and promotes a second “operation smile” with a decree to put an end to the compulsory use of face masks indoors.
At the same time, Alberto Núñez Feijóo will meet with the social partners to introduce himself and, in passing, expose a blocked government that is shying away from major state agreements despite the seriousness of the economic situation, with runaway inflation on the verge of double-digit figures.
After ten days of adverse polls from all private companies, topped off by the least favourable official CIS of the legislature, Sánchez reappears after his Easter holidays. He will be interviewed to start the week in a media outside the most governmental conglomerate, Antena3. This is a new development that confirms the government’s concern about the deterioration of its image and the decline in the PSOE’s voting intentions in recent weeks, behind the PP in all the polls.
The President of the Government has systematically avoided appearing in Parliament on any crisis that might cause him to lose face or leave evidence of his parliamentary weakness. In the last debate in Congress, he went so far as to mix the presentation of his decree in response to soaring energy prices with the breaking of the consensus on the Sahara in the same session so as not to give specific explanations about his foreign policy shift.
Sánchez has avoided the traditional state of the nation debate in Congress since he came to power in June 2018, and the one he had announced for this year is still without a date.
Always tending to play a more presidential role than that of chief executive, Sánchez has the same aversion to press conferences as he does to parliamentary life. He prefers solemn appearances at La Moncloa Palace, without questions from journalists.
In contrast to these habits, the President of the Government is starting his image offensive with a morning interview, including questions, and with optimistic news as a novelty. The Council of Ministers will next approve the decree that will free citizens from the obligation to wear masks indoors.
The original plan was to take this step in March, always following the decisions of other European countries, but the incidence of the virus had not decreased and the government preferred to wait until after Easter.
The precedent of the government’s previous image operation in this area was a fiasco. In the last week of June last year, the Minister of Health, Carolina Darias, launched a campaign to tell Spaniards the good news of the holiday season. “The masks have given way to smiles”, she said after the Council of Ministers. After the summer came the sixth wave.
In parallel to Sánchez’s public presence offensive, what the head of the opposition, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has designed is a position-taking in the economic world. Convinced that the economic factor is the decisive factor in the immediate future of citizens and the one that will decide the next elections, the new president of the PP is meeting this Tuesday with the top leaders of the business organisations, CEOE and Cepyme, and the general secretaries of the trade unions Comisiones Obreras and UGT.
Feijóo is thus taking the initiative with the aim of enriching his proposal for a fiscal and economic alternative in the face of the inaction and “patchwork policy” that he denounces in the Executive. This is the response that Casado’s successor will present next week to Sánchez’s decree on the matter, which must be validated in Congress before the end of the month.
The PP president’s appointments go beyond protocol. They aim to outline a state policy in the face of Sánchez’s castling, recalling what the Moncloa pacts were during the Transition. In 1977, the government of Adolfo Suárez brought about a great general agreement with trade unions, employers’ organisations and political parties to tackle the economic crisis of the time, which included among its fundamental points measures to curb runaway inflation that threatened to bring Spain to ruin.
The initiative of the centre-right government of the time, the UCD, was joined by all the parties with parliamentary representation, from the PSOE and the PCE to the Alianza Popular and the Catalan and Basque nationalists. Now Sánchez only wants a pact that he calls ‘of rents’ between social agents, not with the opposition, while Feijóo is using the example of those broader agreements of La Moncloa.
