After his first face-to-face with Pedro Sánchez, and already on his way to the Senate bar to have a coffee with Javier Maroto and comment on the move, Alberto Núñez Feijóo met a Galician senator from the PSOE who greeted him effusively and congratulated him on his parliamentary debut. Feijóo had been wanting to confront concrete measures against inflation, so he took the opportunity to repeat to him, point-blank, the question that Sánchez had not answered. And why don’t we return to the citizens the excess collection derived from inflation? The rival senator replied that if more income is also because there are more social benefits at stake. But Feijóo did not let go of the dam and replied that if there is an extra 13,500 million in public coffers in just four months, it is fundamentally due to inflation. And that the PSOE should support a “social democratic” measure such as temporarily alleviating the tax burden only on low and medium incomes -with a deflation-, to alleviate the impact of the CPI.
A fortuitous episode like this one serves well to explain the conclusions drawn by the PP from the first face-to-face meeting between Feijóo and Sánchez in the Senate: the president “has not answered anything” and the opposition leader “has placed the message that we wanted , in search of economic pacts».
One of the main ideas with which the PP was presented in this debate was that the electorate of the dissatisfied socialists verified directly that Feijóo’s economic plan is not dogmatic or maximalist. “Lowering personal income tax for low and medium incomes is social democratic,” they point out in their environment. “We do not protect the rich from inflation, only those who do feel the effect of rising prices,” they emphasize.
In Feijóo’s team, they do highlight the unusual thing that Sánchez accused the PP of “getting in the way, getting in the way and getting in the way.” Actually, they thought that the chief executive would not make “the mistake” of “insulting again” the main opposition party. “The thing about getting in the way has shocked us. Not the tone we expected. We are surprised that on the first day Sánchez says that the opposition is in the way. If making proposals is getting in the way…». “We are not used to these debates” with “thick stroke” disqualifications, they pointed out in Genoa.
Feijóo believed so much in his chances of reaching an agreement that he illustrated the first page of the documentation that he took to the Senate with a photo of the Moncloa Pacts. “That image sums up the philosophy of the new stage that we would like to open: the search for consensus in a country that needs a political class that stops being a burden.”
For some of the heavyweights of the PP, the fight was a bit like if athletes from different disciplines who also speak “in a different frequency” were fighting in the ring. Each one posted their messages, with no sign that they can reach an economic agreement, or any agreement in general, before 19-J. «Sánchez has answered us with what was expected: that we are the same as Casado, that we are the extreme right, machismo …», they add in the PP.
Conforms to The Trust Project criteria
