The Popular Party believes that Pedro Sánchez should call elections immediately, after the failure to validate his two decrees on housing, but it is not at all clear that this is what the President of the Government is going to do, after announcing that he is going to reflect over the weekend. Alberto Núñez Feijóo has prescribed caution to his people not because he has information, but out of pure experience. Throughout the legislature the same script has been repeated on several occasions: the PP saw the president as dying and he redoubled his commitment to resist.
Hence, they do not trust the Genoa management. "Sánchez was already headed for elections on many other occasions" and did not call them, reason PP sources consulted by this newspaper. "For now, he has ignored all the cases of dissolution that his Government and his party have incurred," they add. The PP has learned that until it sees it with its own eyes, it should not believe in early elections.
Prudence is the word. "The applause for the Minister of Housing, her face, and the faces of those who applauded... I don't know if they are faces of defeat or goodbye," noted a popular official after the speech of Isabel Rodríguez, who defended the first and most important of the two decrees repealed yesterday.
Genoa has learned the lesson and has deeply internalized it. Of course, in the event that Sánchez listened to those, from the PSOE, who ask him to call the polls at the end of November, the PP would gladly accept the challenge: "We are prepared." In fact, they believe that the social mobilizations harm the president: "We will not understand that Sánchez does not go out on the streets today to meet the Sol protesters," they explain.
The sources consulted by this newspaper think that Sánchez has "a clear incentive" to call the elections now: "Avoid the judicial ordeal." But they also believe that the President of the Government has other reasons to extend the legislature, such as the elections in France and Italy - which can reinforce his alert against the extreme right - or the holding of the trial against his wife, Begoña Gómez.
In reality, the PP leadership would be better off if the legislature continued until spring, to deepen the erosion of Sánchez due to the corruption cases that surround him, but it also welcomes general elections at the end of November or the beginning of December. Confidence in achieving an absolute majority together with Vox is maximum.
"The only decent and democratic solution is to call elections," Feijóo said in statements to the press in the Congress of Deputies. «I am ready, we are prepared. For me, let him call whenever he wants; for Spain, let it call as soon as possible," he solemnized.
While being suspicious of Sánchez's strategy, the PP does not hide its satisfaction at the Government's harsh defeat. The main opposition party celebrates that the majority of Congress has overturned the two housing decrees, because it believes that they would have deployed the same policies that have "destroyed" the real estate market in Spain since Sánchez was in La Moncloa.
But he does not believe that this is another defeat, but rather the penultimate nail in the coffin of the legislature: "We cannot continue on the path we are on," Feijóo stated. "It is unacceptable to use the housing problem to make electoral maneuvers" and not to mention Ceuta, "to hide Zapatero's jewels on the covers" and not to mention "the corruption" that surrounds him, Feijóo warned.
For the leader of the PP, what was seen yesterday in the Lower House was "a vaudeville." "The size of the Government's defeat is only comparable to the frivolity with which they have treated the most relevant issue of citizens in recent years, housing," said the leader of the main opposition party.
"Today no decree has been voted to help Maricarmen, an excuse has been brought here to try to help Pedro Sánchez," he stressed. "Everything has been designed with polls in mind," he said, "and I do not participate in this way of doing politics." «But I accept the challenge: if the president needed a story to call elections and cover up corruption, go ahead. Does Sánchez think he has the alibi? Go ahead, set the date, call elections, let the Spaniards speak," he challenged. And do it in November, he said, because "no one wants Pedro Sánchez this Christmas."
Before him, Juan Bravo, his right-hand man on residential issues, spoke from the rostrum. "They cannot solve the problem because you are the problem," summarized the PP Deputy Secretary General of Finance and Housing.
The popular deputy denounced that the new measures would not have protected the most disadvantaged tenants either: «Do you know what the way to protect vulnerable people is? Expanding the offer.
At that point, Bravo addressed the citizens directly: "We are not going to deceive you, it is not going to be easy nor is it going to be quick. But I promise you one thing. The day will come, and it is not that far away, when you will put a key in a lock. And you're going to say, I'm already home. "We are going to get it."
