The invisible conspiracy
After NATO's hangover in Madrid, the grave economic, political and moral crisis has brought us back to reality. The Atlantic Alliance has expanded to Finland and Sweden in defiance of Putin's bluster - Europe's biggest threat - and has denounced the Chinese danger in the Far East, Africa and Latin America. The southern flank has not been reinforced, so illegal immigration and the sovereignty of Ceuta and Melilla remain as they were.
Uncle Biden has promised that the Ukrainians will not lose the war and has demanded what Trump demanded: a 2% increase in the defence budget and the arrival of two anti-missile destroyers in Rota. We went from four to six. Six hundred more soldiers. Welcome
Restoring bilateral relations
Sánchez has put on his first salute, like Aznar in the Azores, and has said "yes". The ships had already been agreed since February because they arrived 48 hours after the president left Madrid. The base is in San Diego, California, on the west coast of the US. The increase in defence is a necessity that Podemos and the left in general oppose because as fervent communists they clearly support the Russian dictator.
The holy dinner at the Prado Museum has projected the "Spain brand" to the ends of the earth in which the Pedro-Begoña duo have attempted to displace the King and Queen as (provisional) president of the Third Republic and first lady, respectively. The reception of Felipe VI and Doña Letizia confirmed that the Kingdom is in the best of hands. In any case, the wounds opened by Zapatero in 2003 when he disdained the American flag at the 12 October parade seem to have healed. This is no small thing. We have become strategic partners. The generosity of the hosts has paid off.
Now we have to mortgage the future so that the tenants of La Moncloa pay 12 billion more per year for the commitment of citizen Pedro, reconverted to furious Atlanticism and with ambitions to occupy the General Secretariat of NATO. Pedro Sánchez is truly Zelig, Woddy Allen's great chameleonic character. I think he has finally understood that the Alliance is freedom. And freedom comes at a price.
Delegitimising the Transition
The media indignation of Belarra, Irene and Díaz is posturing. Fewer tanks, more hospitals. The Ukrainian holocaust is tragic: 100 deaths a day. In the Council of Ministers where the extra 1,000 million for the army was approved, Podemos always keeps quiet and concedes. They say they knew nothing about it. Where are their representatives in the commission of under-secretaries? Then they crow in the media, in the "tertulias" and in "los canutazos". The question is: why don't the "communist pacifists" go home? Because this is not a coalition government, but a symbiosis of coexistence. It often happens in the animal, plant and mineral world and in everyday life. Examples: tapeworms, plants and bees, shrimps and fish, hyenas and vultures, ants and aphids...
Let's stick to the first classification: coexistence by parasitism. The government is not in danger because the president has chosen sides and the partners have him by the armchairs, the official cars, the salaries, the privileges, the three shared Falcons and the endless transfers to the insurgents. Power is the main mortar of this Executive of necessity until the body endures.
Those who think (PSOE barons included) that the doctor is going to turn towards moderation are naïve. He got on a runaway horse after the motion of censure and will not change his mount at the end of the legislature. He consciously and deliberately bet on the separatist and revolutionary left, which are the same travelling companions of the PSOE in the black biennium (1931-33) that led us to the revolutionary stage of 1934, the Popular Front of 1936 and, finally, to civil war. Here and now, the goal is the path; to delegitimise the Transition in order to prepare with the Law of Democratic Memory the advent of the Republic. Sánchez disguised as Azaña, not as Largo Caballero or Niceto Alcalá-Zamora. With a script by Arnaldo Otegui and music by Puigdemont and Junqueras. Three men of peace.
The vice-president Yolanda Díaz urgently requested a meeting of the coalition pact, but PSOE and Moncloa consider it more urgent to prepare the State of the Nation Debate, which has not been held for seven years. They will have to swallow cartwheels because, as Bono (Don José) says: "Podemos is going to have more public posts than voters".
I am writing hours before this discontinuous minister presents her platform Sumar in Madrid's El Matadero. Great theatrical space. The most brilliant idea I have heard from this lady, number one in national popularity in the tenacious CIS, is to change matria for patria, after her ignorance of the ERES. Now with the new lie of the permanent-discontinuous, the unemployed no longer exist.
After the Andalusian failure, it is easy to advance the work philosophy in this time of listening to the people: "I want a happy, feminist, diverse and inclusive Spain". Too profound a message in the middle of LGTBI week. It couldn't be more hollow . He calls for (transversal) unity among citizens, but excludes his yoga-compis from the Cabinet, except for Enrique Santiago. And his former supporters: Colau and Oltra, both indicted. Suffice it to say that just a few hours before her debut, she appeared with a sticker next to her heart, in this rainbow week, which read: "We exist, so fuck you". Very cool. And uplifting. His summer will be "listening"; hopefully not at taxpayers' expense. What might be of interest would be his proposals for these difficult times; not that he doesn't need a sonotone. Sheer political silliness.
Recession awaits
Inflation has cost the president of INE, Juan Manuel Rodríguez Poo, a decent civil servant, his resignation. 10.2% is an economic, political and social failure. No palliatives. Calviño and her ilk have invented non-existent "green shoots", burnt out by the cost of the shopping basket and the petrol tank. The economic vice-president admitted in parliament that "complex quarters are coming". She meant recession.
However much the National Institute of Statistics and Tezanos' CIS cookers make up the data, the rise in energy costs, the lack of shock measures -despite European funds-, the fall in exports and industrial machinery, are obvious facts. The stock market collapses. Staff are suffering in their own flesh the crisis: cancellation or reduction of holidays, non-payments, bank defaults, suffocation of SMEs and the self-employed, and disenchantment in the countryside due to bad harvests, fires, road transport and the halt in construction. Fortunately, the SC has given us an unexpected gift: the self-employed will not have to pay VAT in advance if they have not collected their invoices. A blow to Montero.
The rise in the price of money seems to be postponed to September while the Euribor and Treasury loans are already costing us money. The deficit and, therefore, the debt, is increasing. Not a single measure to reduce public spending. A dangerous spiral that the ECB is not prepared to finance forever. The worst thing about this time of uncertainty is a government without reasonable initiatives, without internal dialogue or dialogue with the opposition, sustained by decree laws (124 in four years compared to 117 for Rajoy in two legislatures) and a president who promises to stabilise 67,000 civil servants in the public health system when the autonomous regions are already working on it. The EP has ratified that nuclear energy and gas should be considered "green" but Teresa Ribera and her cesarist leader have already said no. Spain is the only country in the world that prevents extractive mining. We already know about Algeria's energy dependence by playing witchcraft with Morocco. The massacre in the assault on Melilla (37 dead) was an "extraordinary job by the Moroccan police" that ended "reasonably well", the president said from Brussels.
Commission of enquiry? Who cares! A fortnight later, Marlaska was lying through his teeth when he assured that "all protocols had been complied with and human rights had been respected". This is our hero.
As if all this were not enough, the recent assault on INDRA -via PRISA- with the dismissal of the independent directors opens a period of legal uncertainty that, after ruining minority shareholders, will scare off investors. This fixed-term government is finalising another approach to the TC. With the collaboration of Carlos Lesmes, a close friend of Gallardón, the government will change the rules of the game once again - in the first one it prevented the acting Council from making appointments - to appoint the four judges of the TC. And it has no intention of taking it to the EU. Conde Pumpido is always willing "to stain his robe with the dust of the road".
At the same time, the TSJC has deserted from applying its own ruling so that at least 25% of Spanish can be studied in Catalonia. Pre-emptive surrender and legitimisation of the disobedience of ERC, Just and PSC. Thank you Illa. Moral recession is more dangerous than any other because it will lead to enabling laws (Hitler, 1933). Another trampling of the judiciary.
In a few months the Constitution will be a dead letter. The radicalisation of the entire left, including UGT and CC.OO., will form a global actor under the slogan "Wage or conflict". The president has already warned of this. The trade union demonstrations in front of the CEOE headquarters are a foretaste of what we will see in autumn when the tourist season closes its doors until Easter. There will be violence on the streets the day after the general elections open. In such a hostile environment is it possible to reach an Income Pact? And on pensions? Impossible.
The polls confirm that the change of cycle has begun. The revolution will be euphemistically called "a spontaneous outburst of the people". The recession will make us poorer and more unsupportive, less free and more unequal.
A stopover in the Azores
The Portuguese islands in the heart of the Atlantic became famous on 16 March 2003 for the summit convened by José Manuel Duráo Barroso. Attendees: George W. Bush (USA), Tony Blair (UK) and José María Aznar (Kingdom of Spain). The ultimatum to Saddam Hussein culminated Operation Enduring Freedom and, perhaps in revenge, the 11-M massacre.
Almost 20 years later, the Azores are back in the limelight because of the stopover the Defence Ministry's Falcon made at the airport to refuel before reaching the east coast of the United States. The distinguished passengers were the Minister for Equality, Irene Montero - "we always travel economy class" -, her cabinet director Lidia Rubio, the Secretary of State, Angela Rodríguez, and the Podemos spokesperson and advisor, Isa Serra. The official agenda made public a posteriori does not justify this public waste.
Pedro, their beloved leader, is always generous with his troops; he lent them the Falcon to get them away from the pomp of the NATO summit. And he got it right. The selfies in Washington and New York give away that the whole trip was a tease to the millions of Spanish citizens who can't make ends meet. How is such obscenity possible with the current economic crisis? Wouldn't it have been much cheaper to travel on a regular airline, even in Business Class? Their former vice-president Carmen Calvo taught them that public money belongs to nobody.
The minister of Galapagar remains silent, just as she did with the massacre in Melilla; with Teresa, the teenager abused by the husband of Monica Oltra (Compromis, partner of the PSV) or the prostituted minors in the Balearic Islands where the government of Francina Armengol (PSOE) had them in shelters. Silence is communism's noblest friend. Isa Serra, sentenced to 19 months in prison for insulting a policewoman and burning ATMs, has defended herself by attacking. "This is political violence against feminist women". With two pairs. They could have gone to Afghanistan or Qatar to defend gay pride and abortion. But they always travel, even with stopovers, to the land of capitalism. When they have toured Washington - not NY - they will have learned where the true capital of empire resides.
Let's hope we know the itinerary and the (real) cost of this tourist trip and that the president does not protect them by applying the Official Secrets Act and the new National Security rule. But beyond the trip, the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Foreign Affairs should explain how a person convicted of serious crimes can evade US customs. Who provided them with a visa, hiding the final sentence of the Spanish justice system? Were they granted a temporary diplomatic passport? Who authorised it?
And I go further: how can the State pay an outrageous salary to a person convicted of humiliating and insulting an exemplary civil servant? Isa is not serving the prison sentence because it does not exceed 24 months and one day and there is no provision for him to be disqualified from holding public office. Sometime politicians must understand that only economic and political disqualification is the most useful tool to put an end to corruption, terrorism and separatism.
Whitewashing Spain's enemies
It has just been 25 years since the release of Ortega Lara. I remember perfectly well the moment of his kidnapping during the National Congress of the PP in Madrid in 1996. The President of the Government, who was so moved in Parliament when an ETA member committed suicide a few months ago, has not been able to write a thread on Twitter. We are not surprised after leaving it in the hands of Mertxe Aizpurua -convicted of collaborating with ETA- that she prolonged Francoism until 1983. We didn't know that Felipe González - "the music doesn't sound good"- was a Francoist. "Call him X", argue Bildu and ERC. Pedro betrays even the FG patriarch.
ETA's revenge for the release of Ortega Lara, now in VOX, was the summary execution of Ermua councillor Miguel Ángel Blanco. I don't know where Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón was. I do. That Saturday afternoon, 12 July, I was in Puerta del Sol, begging the terrorists not to kill him. My 13-year-old daughter still remembers it with pain. It was no use praying out loud. The spirit of Ermua changed the course of history. Spain reacted and Carlos Totorica, the socialist mayor of the city, woke us up from a totalitarian nightmare. For fifteen years, ZP and Sánchez have been whitewashing the Basque murderers and their heirs.
Five lustrums later, Felipe VI will come to the Biscayan town this Sunday to pay homage to Miguel Ángel Blanco. And Sánchez will be there, hiding behind the Crown. Several associations of Victims of Terrorism have declined to attend because there are 370 unsolved murders that the Public Prosecutor's Office does not investigate, and because this symbiotic government has supported Bildu unwaveringly in Navarre to the point of becoming a "strategic partner" of the Government of the Nation. "I will never govern with Bildu. I will tell you once, and if you want, I will tell you twenty times. I will never govern with Bildu. Sánchez's word. This provocation cannot go well.
The conspiracy was missing
I end by justifying the title. The president's statements accusing the bourgeoisie with cigars of fabricating a plot with hidden (and invisible) forces through their media terminals to bring down this very progressive Executive, reminds us of Franco and his Judeo-Masonic conspiracies. The entire IBEX and the rogue press are working to bring down this government that we democrats do not deserve. If the external enemy is Putin, maybe the conspirators are in his own team.
The campaigns of emotionality and victimhood do not work. He controls from the BOE to PRISA and RTVE; from La Cinco and La Sexta to RNE, the EFE agency, the CIS, the CNI - mortally wounded - to Twitter, FB, several autonomous television stations and he pays obeisance to foreign correspondents and the directors of the "heart" programmes.
When in politics, rivals become shadows, fear has begun to pierce the universe of lies on which the narrative has been built. It no longer engages in self-criticism. After the Andalusian defeat, he wants us to believe that morality is very high, almost religious, medieval. Let him take note of the lying journalist and most deceitful politician of our time: Boris Johnson.
Dr. Sanchez is no longer happy with what he has. Therefore, he will never be happy with what he lacks. Persecution no longer leads directly to martyrdom, but to delirium, to delirium tremens. It will become even more radicalised because its supporters know its weaknesses. Dividing civil society is the most immediate goal. It is loyal to its partners and therefore cruel to everyone else. Invisible ghosts exist only in his Monclovite factory of ideas. Propaganda. He is afraid of the future. Of "Pegasus" and the "fascist" centre-right PP-VOX. Now, he is afraid, above all, of public opinion and the freedom of the ballot box.
Antonio REGALADO runs BAHÍA DE ÍTACA