Take care of the sweet defeat, said the augur in his ear when César Pedro Sánchez was going to the meeting of his people. They're not going to stab me, if that's what you're referring to, the Caesar answered, and he stretched out his arm to point with the palm of his hand as they burst into applause as soon as the door of the federal committee was opened a crack.. Nothing remained, it is true, of as many rumors as there were about the fall of the PSOE general secretary as soon as the polls closed on July 23. Everyone saw him finished, finished again, charred, so the calendar that awaited him was taken for granted.. Immediate resignation and extraordinary congress of the socialists. How many times had they repeated it? So now, after appearing again, walking calmly, as movie heroes do when they emerge unscathed from the door of a burning house, no one has the right to even discuss their plans.. Except for the augur who whispers in his ear, take care, oh Caesar!, of this sweet defeat that tastes like syrup.
No one will dispute that Pedro Sánchez is a leader who, with absolute cold blood, knows how to play his political cards in extreme situations for anyone else. Until now, all his bets have turned out well, or very well, no matter how risky they were, like this last one regarding the electoral advance, which paradoxically turns victory into a serious risk of disconnection from reality. Pride, as history knows, is the worst poison of a political leader, and it comes when someone considers himself invincible, invulnerable.. Sánchez's problem is that, after the elections, he has already begun to show clear symptoms of the arrogance that flows in every decision, in every expression.
When it is said, as we do, that Pedro Sánchez has triumphed in the elections, we are obviously referring to the fact that he has achieved the two objectives that he had set for himself, that his main adversary, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has not achieved an absolute majority in the Congress of Deputies, not even with the support of Vox, and that it is not possible for it to form a Government with the support of other parliamentary groups. Feijóo, simply, does not have within his reach the parliamentary sum to be president of the Government, while Pedro Sánchez can make it possible.
A democrat, leader of a political party like the PSOE, which is one of the two pillars of Spanish democracy, has to know how to distinguish between an electoral triumph and a parliamentary triumph.. His first democratic obligation is to recognize the victory of his adversary in the general elections and, from there, do the impossible to try to form an alternative government.. Sánchez is not respecting, once again, the minimum required in democracy on the forms. They are not mere gestures, it is not protocol; forms in democracy are fundamental principles. And the first of all of them is the recognition of who has won an election as soon as the polls close..
Pedro Sánchez, without the arrogance that has permeated him after this latest political odyssey, is obliged to allow the first to request the investiture of the head of state to be Alberto Núñez Feijóo, if the president of the Popular Party so decides.. And once it fails, as it seems it will, then it will be its turn, as the second most voted party, to try to form a government with the support it obtains from the Chamber. Pedro Sánchez, from what we are seeing, continues to behave as President of the Government and has no intention of getting out, not for a single second, of that treatment. His strategy now is to ignore what happened in the elections and go directly to the confirmation of his position, without a solution of continuity.. Continuously. But the legitimate right of those who have won the elections to present their candidacy, before the institution that represents Spanish sovereignty, cannot be considered an annoying interruption in anyone's plans..
It also happens, and this is the greatest danger that can be seen in this hasty and overwhelming strategy of the socialist leader, that the image that he seems to want to convey is that only a majority counts here, that of the block that Pedro Sánchez brings together, while the other, everything else that is not integrated there, should not even be considered. As if they were stinking votes… that add up to half of Spain.
The Pedro Sánchez of the electoral campaign was a creation —very effective, by the way—, but it already seems to have expired. That close politician, who would sit in the program for two fifteen-year-olds to chat with them as well as with their fiercest television critic. The politician who wanted to debate all the time no longer exists. He no longer debates, nor argues; Now he only communicates decisions. The time of La Pija and La Quinqui has already passed, because Bizcochito, as they called it, has turned into a cobblestone. (We will see, and it will be good to write it down here, when he returns again to the media, which he has despised for years and to which he resorted in the electoral campaign, as part of his strategy against “the right-wing media bubble”. ).
Therefore, the augur approached to whisper in his ear. Take care, Caesar, of the sweet defeats. In fact, she had already warned him on the night of the elections, when he left the balcony, fingering the red cloth bracelet he was wearing.. The one from the heart of the PSOE. Begoña, his wife, was given a sanxe bitch badge and he was given that bracelet, when they already knew that the elections had gone better for them even than they thought and it was just a matter of waiting. The augur whispered it in his ear, but Sánchez did not hear it because of the applause. Besides, he wasn't about to think about bad omens when he had just survived another announced political death..