Friday, March 29

Felipe González suggests that the ministers of United We Can are the “most dangerous adversaries” of Felipe VI


Felipe González has turned 80 years old. He has celebrated it by eating for the first time with his three children and also with an interview in About Évole (La Sexta) in which he has revealed a more personal facet than usual. He has been taking sleeping pills since he was 40 years old, although he never needed psychological help when he was in Moncloa – “it probably would have been good” -, and he admits that he has not been a good father for not having spent all the time he should with his children, but he does believe he has been a good husband. He speaks with some devotion of his mother and reveals that his father did not visit him in Madrid in the fourteen years that he was Prime Minister. But the former socialist leader, who every day writes a note about current affairs, takes the opportunity to present his reflections on national and international politics.

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The former president acknowledges that he is “disappointed” with Juan Carlos I and that this has been transferred to him in some private conversations that they have had in recent times, although he avoids delving into the matter. He also reveals that he speaks periodically with Felipe VI. When he calls you, because he doesn’t pick up the phone. He says about the current king and his father that “they are very different”: “Felipe VI has, from the point of view of training, infinitely more complete, much more studies, he is much more thoughtful and has a calmer character. The other is more intuitive and olfactory”.

He rejects that the current head of state is making the mistakes that led Juan Carlos de Borbón to leave Spain, but admits that he has “notorious and prejudiced adversaries.” Who is it? It is there where Felipe González reveals the antipathy generated by United We Can. “Those who assume a position saying with loyalty to the king, complying with the Constitution, the legal system and the next day they put their hands, are the most dangerous”, he affirms.

Despite the discomfort generated by the possible return of the emeritus in the Government and in Zarzuela, González does consider that he should return to Spain: “Affection does not intervene there, it is a reflection of mine that does not commit anyone from the institutional point of view and the management of a political problem”. And it is that the former president defends the legacy left by Juan Carlos I, despite the scandals about his finances.

González acknowledges that he was worried “sometimes that he would leave Zarzuela and get on a motorcycle”, although he assures that “he knew it quickly”. In fact, he downplays the outings abroad of the then monarch -of which he says he was always informed-, including the occasion in which the then president admitted to journalists that the head of state was absent in full relief of the minister of Exteriors. In his notes, he collected the “absence of the king”, as the journalist Jordi Évole has reminded him. “What I can assure you is that in my memory it does not respond to anything relevant,” he replied.

In national politics, the former general secretary of the PSOE wants “the PP crisis to be resolved soon” considering that the big parties are the ones who have to preserve the institutions. “It will be good for all of us,” he assures, acknowledging that he has a good relationship with the man who is assumed to be the new leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, with whom he understands “easily.” He considers that the Galician president defends “not the center but the space of centrality to avoid more tension, irrationality in the arguments and exclusion of the other”. The speech collides with the one that the PSOE is trying to show about Feijóo, who is placed on the right despite his moderate image; but González has repeated the same thing as in his party’s 40th Congress, to which he was invited after years of estrangement with Pedro Sánchez: “I feel free because I say what I think and I feel responsible because I think what I say.”

Does Isabel Diaz Ayuso represent the trumpism? “Trump is more unpleasant in appearance,” was his first response to the Madrid president: “But that line is a bit. I don’t dare define it.” “I imagine what his opinion, participation or decision would be like in one of these NATO or European councils in the Ukraine crisis and I have a hard time fitting it in.”

“Putin’s interference in the Catalan crisis is well known”

The former president points to Vladimir Putin. “He resembles the figure of Hitler more than that of Stalin”, he responds to those who place the Russian president in communism. “There is Putin and there are many children of Putin around the world,” he warned, referring to Nicolás Maduro, Daniel Ortega and Jair Bolsonaro. “We have to put a thread on that kite to understand what is happening to us.” González has also pointed to Putin as one of the elements behind the stabilizing elements of the EU and, specifically, he has referred to the independence movement in Catalonia: “His interference in the Catalan crisis is well known. a little more but it is quite well known”.

The socialist believes that the Russian invasion of Ukraine may be the most important event in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. “There will be a major change in international reality from this intolerable, reprehensible fact of an autocrat with the totalitarian capacity of dominating power that has no public opinion, that crushes a defenseless people”, he replied. “He doesn’t want it to be neutral, he wants to neutralize it, it’s not the same [dice sobre Ucrania]. He wants her to be so neutral that she doesn’t choose her fate.”

“There will not cease to be pressure on the tyranny that Putin exerts around him until Putin returns to the borders of the Russian federation,” he said of the invasion. González, who spoke with Sánchez last weekend in the calls that the president made to his predecessors, has defended the “income pact” that he proposed in Congress on Wednesday as a kind of Moncloa Pact like the one he promoted during his mandate.





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