10 years later, Sánchez’s attack on Rajoy becomes a boomerang against him

The young aspiring socialist, Pedro Sanchezbroke all taboos ten years ago today, during the electoral debate on Monday, December 14, 2015, by personally attacking popular veteran president Mariano Rajoy.

“The Spaniards, on December 20, will have to choose freely through their vote who will be the next president of the government. Now, yes, I warn you that if you continue to be so, the cost for our democracy and for the institution that you want to represent is enormous, because the president of the government, Mr. Rajoy, must be an honest person and you are not.”

An accusation which, ten years later, returns like a boomerang against Sánchez. He pronounced these words, which closed a long intervention by two minutes and 28 seconds.

At that time, like someone reciting a lesson learned, the socialist rejoiced in his good fortune. He examined the SMS from “Luis, be strong”the “blush” caused by the press conference during which Rajoy denounced the fact that Gürtel “a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy against the PP”vacation “paid by Correa” of the president, computers “destroyed with a hammer”the seat “paid in B”or what “everything is wrong except something”…

After a decade, we now know Sánchez better.

“We know that prepare well its dialectic highlights”, recalls José Ignacio Wert, former Minister of Education, Culture and Sports. And if this has settled in the jug of History as a transgression, In reality, it was only the first.

“I was already in Paris,” explains Wert who, tired, had not completed his mandate and had been appointed ambassador to the OECD.

“When I got home that evening, we started the debate…and I remember being impressed when I heard that. I experienced it as a game changerand now so I predicted that this guy had no barriers and that he had just changed Spanish politics. Indeed, today such a thing would go unnoticed. »

Since then, we have heard the current president describe Alberto Núñez Feijóo, his current rival within the PP, as a “friend of drug traffickers”.

The previous one, Pablo Casado, ended thus during a control session: “It’s not that it’s funny, it’s that it’s sad see the Popular Party that you lead. » And to Santiago Abascal another Wednesday in Congress, he blurted out that “personifies hatredwhich is the prelude to physical violence.

The “new politics”?

The truth is that even if this attack ad hominem This surprised as a tactic “never used”, as another collaborator of the former president recalls today, and even scandalized many, at the time it seemed little more than a dialectical waste.

Indeed, the next day, this newspaper highlighted Rajoy’s “fuss”, lacking “arguments” before the “beating” that Sánchez inflicted on him that swearing, valued as the culmination of an “insistent attack” in front of a “nervous” and “vulnerable” leader.

This is what the editorial of EL ESPAÑOL says: “Even Aznar’s “go away, Mr. González” doesn’t compare to “you are not an honest politician”, which will remain forever as a memory of this confrontation, the last of the two-party system.

And these are elections in which we did not yet know, as deputies, neither Pablo Iglesias, leader of Podemos, nor Albert Riveratop of the Ciudadanos list.

The first had been in Brussels for a year and a half, after having surprised by winning five MEPs in the deep furrows of the crisis. And the second led a (still) progressive centrist party which had developed in the Parliament of Catalonia, snatch votes from a CFP thrown into the mountains processist.

“It is said that if polarization was accompanied by new policy…it’s funny to think about it now. “Pedro Sánchez inaugurated it in this debate!” Wert laughs on the other end of the line.

“Felipe had pitted the Doberman against Aznar, but it was different,” he reflects, speaking of his role as a sociology professor. “It is one thing to criticize, or even disqualify an ideology, and another attacking a fundamental attribute of morality, of the performative“.

Sánchez reached an agreement with both forming a government, “the only thing that motivates it”Rajoy himself commented on this recently.

He signed with Rivera before the team The hug from Genovés; and he sealed his coalition executive with Iglesias with another hug, this one personal, although forced… but for both of them, it also had its own thing.

During the last plenary session of the 2019 legislature, Sánchez demanded that the leader of the Cs “show more ideas and less testosterone“.

And he never attacked his vice president so much in public, but in the messages he exchanged with José Luis Ábalos, now discovered in the UCO investigations, not only he called him “clumsy”said of him that he was “a brother-in-law” who acts with “stupidity”.

“Psychologically poorly prepared”

The truth is that neither “play Sam again” nor “you are not an honest politician”, as transcribed by EL ESPAÑOL, in the column published a few hours after the debate.

“Didn’t he say ‘you’re not an honest person’? I just don’t remember…”, reflects José Manuel García Margallo, another minister in the government of this PP cornered by corruption. “Well, it’s the same… Mariano didn’t expect a rival who would demonstrate that he had no moral limits.”

Leaving the Antena 3 studios, after Manuel Campo Vidal forced farewell greetingthe president at the time admitted that “psychologically he was not prepared for this.”

Margallo explains it in her more humorous style: “We would never have expected something so crazy.”

And even less from who it comes from. “Sánchez assured that he would manage to restore democratic cleanliness and transparency,” recalls the former Minister of Foreign Affairs. “He came to argue that Only he and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero had presided over immaculate leaders“.

For Margallo, heard today, that It’s “a damn joke”.

Especially because for years he had known the warning from party colleagues, “those of the usual PSOE”, who had already warned before his arrival at Moncloa. “I have socialist friends and they have already told me that indicated means“, he slips.

“They said he had no idea of ​​political ethics. Nor of morality, if it got in the way of his objectives.” And he adds today, straight from a televised discussion with a PSOE deputy: “Next to him, Machiavelli’s “Prince” is Kempis!”.

The reality has surpassed the omens of this debate. However, we know that even before he took office with the motion of censure, the presidential circle was already active. “They had already repeated their corruption in Navarre”underline the same sources.

When Rajoy said “ruiz”

Rajoy, that evening, took the blow as best he could. “Mariano did not react badly,” defend the two former ministers, even if his nerves played a verbal trick on him. “He called it ‘ruiz’ instead of ‘ruin’, a slip of the tongue,” Margallo recalls sarcastically. “But He knew how to then add “wicked and wretched.”. “It was not tolerated!”

But today, the limit of tolerance seems infinite. At least, among Sánchez’s associates who, like Sgt. Casablancaevery day They pretend to be surprised because “here they play games”, while they “make their profits”» deplores the veteran Christian Democrat.

To the leader of the PSOE “He is only interested in power”they deplore to the Popular Party. “He showed it during the inauguration of the amnesty. And now, he is ready to do anything to maintain it,” Margallo even warns, until “putting an end to the exclusive sovereignty of the Spanish people”enshrined in the Constitution.

The transition to a confederal model destroys Magna Carta. And in doing so, it undermines the two fundamental principles of the historic left: “Equality and solidarity between citizens, Who is not decent now?“.

However, Wert reasons, his partners don’t care “this whole succession of unprecedented corruption”. The seed was there, Margallo concludes. On December 14, Pedro Sánchez “had already demonstrated that he was a person without any moral limits“.