“Lose all hope of breaking this PSOE,” he said. Oscar Puente from the stands while Pedro Sánchez was already rehearsing the applause. The former mayor of Valladolid concluded with a sentence: “Do not waste time looking for dissidents or traitors, none are representative of this PSOE.” No traitor who dissents from Sánchez or his project for the investiture is worthy of the acronym, the spokesperson came to say, while Sánchez himself warmed up to stand up. He finished doing so when Puente, whose intervention the vast majority of the deputies of the socialist group were unaware of, emphasized that the party was no longer theirs “but rather its militants, the people.”
On behalf of the people, then, Óscar Puente spoke – “the deputy from Valladolid”, he insisted on calling him Feijóo throughout the afternoon – to complete the president’s trip and with him, that of the PSOE. That conversion of the party into a kind of oracle of collective will comes from Sánchez and ends in Sánchez. It comes from Sánchez in 2016, resigned or expelled from the general secretary due to the internal debate over his “no means no” against the investiture of Mariano Rajoy. And he arrives at the Sánchez of 2023, legitimized to agree with anyone to obtain his, elevated above the absolute absence of internal debate. And external.
Sánchez did not even need to speak, but for them to speak for him, for the “militants” or for the “people”, all the same, according to the intervention of an Óscar Puente who seemed to respond to the former vice president Alfonso Guerra, which days ago predicted that the period of absence of internal debate in the PSOE will end soon. Nothing seems to indicate it for now. Puente left it: the PSOE “is no longer one of its leaders, neither current nor historical.”
But it will be Sánchez, not the “people”, who will have to make an agreement. And although he did not speak yesterday, he did listen selectively. He listened with earpiece to the interventions in Catalan by Gabriel Rufián (ERC) and Miriam Nogueras (Junts), enablers of his future investiture, but emptied his seat when Alberto Núñez Feijóo responded to them, to whom Sánchez made it clear with his attitude that he is of no use. Always utilitarianism in the president’s biography.