In control session to the president that many groups took as their assessment of the year, Alejandro Fernández (PP) saved one of the different problems that the Mediator of Greuges dealt with on Tuesday: the situation of the DGAIA. The leader of the PP spoke of a “disgusting and nauseating episode (…) perfectly organized corruption, cronyism, (…) false invoices everywhere (…) deficient guardianship of children and adolescents with constant abuse and pedophilia”. But the same conservative spokesperson, in the previous session, while flying over Parliament about the swine fever crisis, also focused his intervention on a horrible subject: the case of the former socialist leader Francisco Salazar, who triggered something that resembles a #metoo in the PSOE (as Milagros Pérez Oliva says in this newspaper). In both cases, Fernández seems to be trying to transfer to Parliament one of the burning debates of the Congress of Deputies and to ensure that the echo of the Madrid dialectical war resonates in the Catalan chamber. The Catalan PP, or at least its leader, is trying to spray Salvador Illa with a little of the bile that Pedro Sánchez receives, perhaps hoping that the president will also react with, let’s say, the vivacity with which the president of the government counterattacks.
But, oh my friend, Alejandro Fernández stings ferro fred. Illa is not used to returning shots with the same force and beyond the net, but instead feels more comfortable playing from the back of the court. How difficult it is to get rid of the man who made calm his trademark! I’m not saying he doesn’t respond to opposition attacks, but he wouldn’t pass the casting call to play Oscar Puente or Miguel Tellado. The Illa formula includes these elements: deny the disaster/admit one’s inadequacies/promise generic improvements/promise an effort, also generic/counterattack with a reproach more or less linked to the problem. And all this, in a discreet tone. Even the illusory impulses of the extreme right cannot extract a superlative from him.
This is the Pax Illana, which benefits, of course, from the fact that the majority of parliamentary groups do not participate in this desire to make the Madrid speech. It is not that the Government is not criticized but, with the exceptions already mentioned, Parliament does not suffer from the syndrome of hyperbolic adjectives. Junts spokesperson Monica Sales can speak of government “paralysis” and Josep Maria Jové (ERC) of “government in waiting,” yes, but that is nothing compared to “Prostitution and gossip are two essential elements that will haunt Sánchez throughout his career” (Feijoo 2025). In other words, when Alejandro Fernández tries to transfer the style of his boss(es) to Ciutadella, he clicks. In the short term, some will consider that this confinement contributes to boring politics, but it is also true that not being ashamed of our representatives is something that, in the long term, is comforting.
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