After chatting with Ignacio Varela and Manuela Carmena, Felipe González counts for episode 3 of ‘Infrequent Sintonies’ with the presence of the current president of the Xunta de Galicia Alberto Núñez Feijóo. Both embark on a dialogue about the need for pacts, the financing system, or the state of the autonomies. They also address other current issues such as the pardons for the prisoners of the procés, the state of alarm, or the reform of the electoral law.

Listen for free to all episodes of Felipe González here

Felipe González has initiated the conversation with Feijóo emphasizing the moment of challenge Spain is facing, a situation that requires “great pacts like those of Moncloa,” referring to the agreements of the 77 transition, and has asked the president of the Xunta to identify those challenges to open up to a dialogue that “I would wish for Spain and not just for us.”

“Problems must be faced from the centrality, not from the center, which is a rare geometric point”

In this line of lack of dialogue, the president of the Xunta laments the scarcity of debates and the way in which “tweet politics has come to modify politics,” a point for which González has once again recalled the figure of Joe Biden as an ally to end the ‘tweet debate’: “Biden does not wake up obsessed with the tweets he is going to make throughout the day,” he states.

It is Feijóo who gives an example of this new political form: “In Mariano Rajoy's investiture debate in 2016, the Podemos benches were tweeting all the time, no one paid attention to what was said.”

The pardons 

Beyond the coronavirus pandemic, the rebound of the economy, or the progress of vaccination, the former socialist president has wanted to focus the dialogue on other events “that will last longer,” such as the debate on the pardons for those convicted of the procés. With this, Felipe González has wanted to take advantage of the situation to clarify his opinion on ‘El Hormiguero’: “I have not said no to the pardons, I have said that the conditions for the pardons are not given, which is quite different, I do not have a vengeful spirit,” he states.

“The Government has to decide the pardons based on certain foundations, we have a problem of coexistence and a problem of territorial governance”

And González has emphasized that for reconciliation or reunion to occur, the government of Catalunya must govern respecting, even if they do not believe in them, the Constitution and the Statute, and he has assured that he feels “fear” of entering a dynamic that is interpreted in the rest of Spain as an anti-Catalan campaign. For his part, the president of the Xunta has taken the challenge and stated that not only are the conditions not given, but there are none: “They have no interest in talking and bringing things up normally.”

For his part, Feijóo concluded with a utopian reflection on restoring the Catalan seny and clarified that “the problem is that this is pardoning a parliamentary partner, which is Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, to end a legislature.”

The financing of the autonomous communities

One of the most important points addressed in episode 3 of ‘Infrequent Sintonies’, which you can listen to exclusively on Podimo, has been the financing of the autonomous communities, a debate opened by the former president of the Xunta asserting that the current financing system of the communities is the system that the Generalitat of Catalunya agreed upon with the Central Government: “It is not a criticism, it is a chronicle,” he states. “To say that the financing system of Spain's autonomies does not respect what Catalunya proposed, I can say that,” he concluded.

In this line, Felipe González agrees with his guest: “As far back as I can remember, the autonomous financing system has never been developed with the disagreement of the Generalitat.”

“Not even the argument of financing is an argument they can raise their voices with,” states Feijóo

Felipe González believes there is a before and after in the Spain of the communities after the health and educational transfer: “The educational transfer could be digested, but the health one could not, it was a deficit transfer,” he mentions, ending with a defense of the autonomous state against “the issues of little rationality of some political parties that were not relevant and now are.”

The Constitution

Both leaders agree on the Constitution as the main meeting point, Feijóo has also emphasized that those who are against it “are the heirs of those who tried to frustrate it at the time of its approval, what happens is that now they have power and before they did not.” 

“The independentists are politicians who gain votes and have their ideologies, but Catalunya is much more,” states Feijóo.

Furthermore, González states that if he accepted that only the vote gives the right to break the rules of the game, we would have to accept the historical consequences we know which are named Hitler or Mussolini: “No one is convicted in Spain for their ideas, before reaching convictions, facts that violate constitutional loyalty must occur.”

The State of alarm

One of the hot debates in the current political and social landscape in recent months has been the declaration and deactivation, with highs and lows, of the state of alarm. “The International Scientific Community has had time to create a vaccine, and yet in Spain we haven’t had time to create any law to manage the pandemic. It should make us reflect,” questions the president of the Xunta.

Both agree that there are decisions that must be made under the protection of the state of alarm, but the problem, they say, has come after its deactivation and the process of judicialization in the management of the pandemic. “I do not agree with the proposal to replace the state of alarm, but I do agree with the intention,” continues González, assuring and reminding that to limit fundamental rights after the state of alarm, the alternative legislation must have the same normative rank as the state of alarm.

In addition, both have wanted to end the conversation by recalling a necessary reform of the electoral law. While González again brought up the idea of opening the lists “to strike out those I do not want to vote for,” Feijóo focused on other aspects: “I want the most voted candidate to be the one to choose the mayor of my town,” he concluded.