“Lose all hope of breaking this PSOE,” said Óscar Puente from the stands while Pedro Sánchez was already rehearsing the applause. The former mayor of Valladolid concluded with a sentence: “Do not waste time looking for dissidents or traitors, none are representative of this PSOE.” No traitor who dissents from Sánchez or his project for the investiture is worthy of the acronym, the spokesperson came to say, while Sánchez himself warmed up to stand up. He finished doing so when Puente, whose intervention the vast majority of the deputies of the socialist group were unaware of, emphasized that the party was no longer theirs “but rather its militants, the people.”
On behalf of the people, then, Óscar Puente spoke – “the deputy from Valladolid”, he insisted on calling him Feijóo throughout the afternoon – to complete the president’s trip and with him, that of the PSOE. That conversion of the party into a kind of oracle of collective will comes from Sánchez and ends in Sánchez. It comes from Sánchez in 2016, resigned or expelled from the general secretary due to the internal debate over his “no means no” against the investiture of Mariano Rajoy. And he arrives at the Sánchez of 2023, legitimized to agree with anyone to obtain his, elevated above the absolute absence of internal debate. And external.
Sánchez did not even need to speak, but for them to speak for him, for the “militants” or for the “people”, all the same, according to the intervention of an Óscar Puente who seemed to respond to former vice president Alfonso Guerra, who Days ago I predicted that the period of absence of internal debate in the PSOE will end soon. Nothing seems to indicate it for now. Puente left it: the PSOE “is no longer one of its leaders, neither current nor historical.”
But it will be Sánchez, not the “people”, who will have to make an agreement. And although he did not speak yesterday, he did listen selectively. He listened with earpiece to the interventions in Catalan by Gabriel Rufián (ERC) and Míriam Nogueras (Junts), enablers of his future investiture, but he emptied his seat when Alberto Núñez Feijóo responded to them, to whom Sánchez made it clear with his attitude that he has no use not at all. He always utilitarianism in the president’s biography.
The Sánchez who handed in his deputy certificate so as not to have to obey the party in 2016 did so so he could return later. Like Sánchez who did not want to defend the amnesty yesterday, as Sumar did, he temporized in order to be able to defend it in the future, in more favorable circumstances. Tradition or parliamentary courtesy was in both cases an easy obstacle to overcome.
The acting president already writes his own rules because he has surpassed all the milestones for which his party put its foot down in 2016 and recovered a year later. Puente’s sentence yesterday, placing the party at the feet of Sánchez as the militant in chief, sounded like the proclamation of the winner of the 2017 primaries six years late and with a new audience. In the current PSOE described by Puente, the standing ovation of Vice President Nadia Calviño or Minister José Luis Escrivá, without a party card, is worth more than the serious or light reproach of former presidents, former vice presidents and former ministers who have always done so. had, even if they are no longer “representative.”
Sánchez has changed the PSOE at the rate at which he himself evolved and was taking revenge for all the red lines that were imposed on him one day. The no to Podemos culminated in the hug with Pablo Iglesias before the January 2020 investiture. The cordon against Bildu was broken with the battering ram of a vaporous document on labor reform with the country focused on deconfinement. That tsunami is now remembered as an insignificant detail compared to the current solidity of their parliamentary alliance in Madrid, not yet in the Basque Country.
The socialists, who focused their response to Feijóo on presenting him as an unauthorized leader within the party, did not need a word from their general secretary to project the image of an obedient army with interchangeable parts. From deputy 1 to 121, the voice of the PSOE speaks for Sánchez and protects Sánchez, the “militant”, the “people.”