I do not even want to think what would be happening to Former Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy, and how the opposition would be crushing him -that is the PSOE- if he had gone to relax at the Palace of the Marismillas in the heart of the Doñana National Park -as his successor has done- in the midst of an institutional crisis in Spain, with an acting government and unable to overcome an investiture session. But the fact is that Pedro Sánchez has discovered a magnificent aspect of politics: in the face of Rajoy's clumsiness -an exaggerated object of mockery for his dissatisfaction with the media- the current acting PM places his broad smile wherever he goes and abracadabra: the famous Rajoy's no-questions-allowed press conferences have given way to something more sophisticated. In fact, the acting PM today already wrote it in 2011, when he was a simple deputy: the look and the smile, two powerful weapons of communication / persuasion.
Sanchez has wasted a third of the time available to him, two months, between his failed investiture and the call for elections, 23rd September, if the political blockade continues. In these 20 days elapsed in practice, photos have been taken of him with social actors who had little to say about his investiture, he disregarded Podemos, he sent his ministers to various TV channels with unclear messages about the investiture, he has issued contradictory messages about his will to speak with the pro-independence forces -first it was a straight ‘no’, later we will see, and now maybe ‘yes’- and he has begged for PP and Ciudadanos’ abstention to avoid a negotiation with Pablo Iglesias’ Podemos.
Of the real problems we have known nothing: from the worrying signs of the economy, to a second semester complicated with the Open Arms ship [at sea on a life-saving mission], sailing without a port of call across the Mediterranean. It is not without a certain shame that one recalls what Sanchez was saying when Rajoy was the PM, that as you may have guessed, is the opposite of what he is now saying. Or that one day a coalition government is offered and the next he says that this is a bygone picture. Little, very little, he must have believed in that.
But first things first, holidays. Spain continues to be different.