Aznar enters the campaign: Faes alleges that the PSOE does not give Bildu "institutional play" but "political power"
Bildu's decision to present in the lists for the 28-M in the municipalities of the Basque Country a total of 44 convicted of belonging to ETA, of which seven became so for crimes of blood, has ended up tarnishing the start of the electoral campaign of the PSOE.
To the numerous criticisms of the entire opposition for the political alliances between the Socialists and this formation, the Foundation of the former President of the Government, José María Aznar, has joined this Friday. Faes alleges that the PSOE does not give Bildu an “institutional game” but effective “political power”.
A power that, the foundation recalls, Bildu never received from the polls: “What the PSOE has granted to the supporters of ETA – who continue without condemning it, that is, without ruling out that the conditions that justify their return exist -, do not It has not been an institutional game but effective political power, which the ballot box never gave them, government power”.
[The PP ironizes with Sánchez's ministers who flee so as not to answer about their pacts with Bildu]
The analysis, signed by Miguel Ángel Quintanilla, national deputy of the PP, underlines that the moment in which the Government grants this power to Bildu coincides with the “practical disappearance of the operational capacity of the” terrorist band, “their police defeat, legal and social”. Hence, he emphasizes that Pedro Sánchez grants ETA sympathizers “a structural role in the governance of Spain and a growing dominance over Basque society.”
Faes frames the pacts between PSOE and Bildu in a mere matter of “interest” that, moreover, comes from afar. Because the socialists have not “obeyed a fundamental political conviction, but rather an 'imperative need' to find anywhere the votes and seats that the more temperate zones of their classical electorate stopped providing from 1996”.
Criticism of Zapatero
According to the Aznar foundation, “the loss of the center and the Government by the PSOE was prior to its courtship of the radical vote, not after”. Consequently, the PSOE has not sacrificed “the centered part of its electorate to favor 'peace' by generously accepting the electoral price to pay or a common good, but sought to compensate for the centrist strength of the PP and its own weakness at the polls surrendering to radicals for private gain”.
“Bildu is a member of the PSOE as much as the PSOE is of Bildu; for both of them, that partnership, with a few more, is the only chance of reaching the Government and keeping it.. They are part of a structural agreement that defines a new political time in Spain”, emphasizes Faes.
The foundation is especially critical of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, against whom it attacks because he says that “the democratic promise that he made to the defenders of political assassination must be kept”. In reality, Faes considers that “what he wants is to remind the PSOE that without Bildu -and without ERC- there is no possible socialist government. It's your choice.”
Specifically, the former socialist president recently declared in an interview: “We told those who supported terror in his day that if they left terror they would have the game in the institutions, and I think that this democratic promise must be kept.”
[Bildu has on his 28-M lists 44 convicted for belonging to ETA, 7 of them with murders]
Faes asserts that in this way, “Zapatero forgets that those who supported terror had had a lot of play in the institutions for many years before their outlawing was addressed and before he arrived.”
It also reports that ETA supporters had “dirty play”. Because it was “the victims who could not play on equal terms, and even today they cannot, because they are dead, because they are outside the Basque Country or because they continue to suffer threats, violence and receive doses of memory so that they understand that what is arriving is Bildu, not freedom”, Faes adds.
The organization chaired by Aznar denounces that all this is intended to “maximize the cost of the rival's militancy, all disguised as peace and all aimed at conditioning electoral and social behavior.”. Put to give institutional play, he adds, “the PSOE could easily find those who really deserve it and play it in a fair and constructive way.”