The image of a Ramón Tamames who was soporific, if not actually asleep, and of Santiago Abascal yawning at a certain point during the motion of no confidence in Pedro Sánchez presented by Vox, are the clearest expression of the Spanish grotesqueness experienced this Tuesday in the Congress of Deputies. A nonagenarian economist in his moment of glory turning the chamber of popular sovereignty into a farcical show that serves no purpose, has no utility and is nothing more than a swindle. I won't go into evaluating how Tamames did, which really doesn't matter and will not be remembered by anyone in a few hours, beyond the newspaper archives that record everything. As well as by that part of the press in Madrid that used to be right-wing and must now be directly categorized as extremist, which approached this motion of no confidence as something serious, defending the candidate and trying to catch Pedro Sánchez out at the same time as they gave him minutes of television to use for his own benefit.
At some point during these two days of debate, we could have expected the Socialists (PSOE) to thank Vox. There is nothing that suits Pedro Sánchez better than confronting the far-right and applying a little Tippex to make the People's Party (PP) disappear from the screen. Alberto Núñez Feijóo is a politician with deficiencies and is little loved in Madrid. That thing which in the capital they call peripheral, which in fact means nothing else, in its diagram of power, than second division. A bit similar, even in his aversion to the media power of the capital, to Mariano Rajoy, although he, despite also being Galician, spent almost his entire career in Madrid. Very different from José María Aznar, who, although he had a political career in Castilla y León, was born in Madrid, studied at the religious school of El Pilar, graduated from the Polytechnic University and worked for Hacienda as a state finance inspector.
Well, although the motion was presented against the PSOE-Unidas Podemos government, in reality, Vox presented it against the PP. For Pedro Sánchez, wrapped in his electric blue suit, it had less impact than a tickle and for Yolanda Díaz, one of his deputy PMs and the candidate of the new political project on the left of the Socialists, named Sumar, it provided assistance in continuing with her campaign of presentation to the public. Vox, meanwhile, chose for the motion a candidate who does not represent it and I doubt that he helped to attract voters towards it. The extreme right does not need ex-communists in make-up, nor economists with a certain fame from the past. You only have to read El Mundo, ABC or La Razón or listen to Jiménez Losantos or Carlos Herrera to know that this episode of the Congress of Deputies was simply a variety show.
A comic opera which, indeed, has been of service to the Spanish state - and this is much more serious - in snubbing the European Parliament's Pegasus committee. The indifference with which this EU delegation has been treated by the Spanish government is at odds with the presidency of the European Union, which Sánchez will assume in the second half of this year. It is nothing less than a fraud, denying the committee information so that it can investigate, denying it any contact with any of the 22 ministers that make up the Spanish government, canceling at the last minute an interview with Congress's defence committee because of the no-confidence motion; in short, attempting to gaslight them. The construction of Europe takes place via many routes, but it is certainly not helped by ignoring the European Parliament at the same time as you make great sermons about Europeanism.
Or, perhaps, the no-confidence motion and the treatment meted out to the European committee are nothing more than a Spain of the black-and-white era that has not yet turned the page. The nostalgia of Poland or Hungary, in contrast with the discourses about wanting to be like France or Germany.