(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Sin presupuestos y sin elecciones)
Pedro Sánchez says that he does not need a budget in order to go on governing. That what he himself used to say to Mariano Rajoy, that “if there is no budget, we must go to elections”, was a mere political ruse to throw the People’s Party simpletons out of power. Which he did indeed achieve. But he makes it clear that nobody should come to him with such nonsense, because for the second year running he intends to govern without a budget, rolling over those almost forgotten accounts that have nothing to do with the current Spanish reality and cannot serve even to attempt a year of sound and effective government.
Sánchez could not care less, because his priorities are different. Sánchez wants to stay. And let nobody doubt that if he has to create tensions in order to roll over not only the budget but the parliamentary term itself without calling elections, he will do it. They will come up with ways of generating states of emergency with the same ease with which he proposes to destroy the cross and the basilica of the Valley of the Fallen.
In countries considered democratic, one of the most firmly established elements of institutional hygiene was that accepted obligation to comply with the presentation of the supreme law of government, which is the budget. Should that prove impossible for lack of a majority, the question of confidence was raised, or outright dissolution of parliament and elections, because the government had ceased to have the support of a majority and was therefore stripped of legitimacy.
But imagine how much legitimacy can matter to Pedro Sánchez, when he does not care a fig about legality itself. He does not need a budget, because governing the country with general plans for the national and common good is something he has never done and has neither the intention nor the interest to do now.
Today more than yesterday but less than tomorrow, Sánchez governs exclusively to hold on to power for the sake of impunity for himself, for his family and for a whole government and leadership complicit in the brutal plunder of which Spaniards and the national patrimony are the victims.
Sánchez, without having murdered and tortured as his ally and partner Nicolás Maduro has done, is in the same situation as the criminal Venezuelan dictator: if he loses power he will have immense difficulty in preventing the full weight of the law from falling on him and his troops.
Not even the certain willingness of the People’s Party to forget everything that has happened and to sweep all the mountains of socialist misdeeds under the carpet,
—you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours—, will be able to save them this time, because the brazenness and the haste with which so many have enriched themselves have led them into excess and carelessness. The Dominican Republic is everywhere. That is why we should all be aware that the people who govern today with Sánchez at their head are capable of anything in order to carry on.
And think about the context. The virtual single party of social democracy that the People’s Party members and the socialists make up in Europe feels besieged by the national and sovereigntist parties they call “far right”. The panic has soared after Trump’s victory. That is why they are taking all kinds of measures to preserve the hegemony and power they believed eternal and now see in danger. And those measures are not overburdened with democratic scruples.
In Romania they suspend the elections because they do not like the candidate, and Brussels applauds and awards itself a medal for it. In Austria, obscene outside interference has prevented a coalition government of the conservative forces, the People’s Party and the People’s Party, an alliance that has existed in Austria before and that has nevertheless not been tolerated this time from Germany and Brussels.
And in Germany itself a grotesque event has occurred which nevertheless all the media of synchronised social democratic opinion, and the European Union itself, have accepted with complete calm and applause. In Berlin a triple and far-reaching constitutional reform has been approved by the outgoing and expired parliament a month after the election, because in the new parliament there is no majority for that reform.
All of that has happened in these past months in EU countries without anyone raising their voice except against Hungary and the well-known mania of Viktor Orbán for keeping his electoral promises, defending his national sovereignty and the express will of the Hungarians. Imagine what could be cooked up in the Spain of Pedro Sánchez, Bolaños, Junts, Delcy Rodríguez, Acento, Zapatero, the Chinese embassy, Otegui and the São Paulo drug forum triumphant along the Guadalquivir, in order to find a pretext that prolongs the political life of the usurper, with or without an embrace from the party of Núñez Feijóo and Ursula von der Leyen.
Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.
