The relief in the INE and the Melilla tragedy put the Government on the defensive

The Government arrived dragging a whole sack of hot potatoes and had to live one morning on the defensive in Congress.

Without Pedro Sánchez, at the NATO summit, or Yolanda Díaz, it was again Nadia Calviño's turn to act as economic and political vice president at the control session this Wednesday.

The opposition did not lambast it only with the figures of the crisis -the usual-, it also did so with the controversial replacement of the person in charge of preparing them, the resigned president of the National Institute of Statistics (INE), Juan Rodríguez Poo.

Calviño avoided the matter as much as she could, until in the end she decided to enter with a solemn declaration: "I have neither pressured nor stopped anyone."

The other focus of the blows against the Government was the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska,

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Marlaska says that it is false that Moroccan gendarmes crossed to the Spanish side

The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, intervenes in a plenary session, in the Congress of Deputies, on June 29, 2022, in Madrid.Photo: Gustavo Valiente (Europa Press) |

Video: EPV

"You look like Houdini," EH Bildu deputy Jon Iñarritu told Marlaska.

Wielding the art of escapism is vital for a minister in his parliamentary exams, and several of them took pains to practice it on Wednesday.

Marlaska did not want to talk about the performance of the Moroccan police in Nador and Calviño did not want to talk about the INE.

And the questioning deputies did not stop talking to them about these things.

But the most refined example of escapism was offered by the Minister of Justice, Pilar Llop, to whom the Junts deputy Josep Pagès asked about various decisions of the European justice system favorable to members of the independence movement.

Llop totally ignored the issue and dedicated himself to deploring the PP's refusal to renew the Judiciary, as well as the ruling on abortion by the United States Supreme Court.

"Those are the things that should concern you," the minister admonished Pagès.

The deputy replied sarcastically: "Let us decide the things that concern us."

The last thesis of the opposition is that the Government is dedicated to the "assault of the institutions".

The expression was mimetically repeated in the mouths of the PP, Vox and Ciudadanos, whose spokesman, Edmundo Bal, climbed one more step and defined the Executive as an "assault battalion on the institutions."

The opponents of the Government resort to already classic episodes - the State Attorney General's Office or the CIS - and a motley mix of other very recent ones.

And there it fits from the relief in the INE, which the opposition attributes to a maneuver to make up the statistics, to the Executive's attempt to circumvent the blockade of the PP to the renewal of the Constitutional Court and even the change of majorities in the company council semi-public Indra.

Calviño resisted entering the INE issue, first in front of the popular Jaime de Olano and then in front of the Vox spokesman, Iván Espinosa de los Monteros.

The charge continued with that of Ciudadanos, and then the vice president settled the issue giving her word that she has not intervened in the relief.

Before the PP, the one who passed for being a technocrat showed again that now she does not shy away from hand-to-hand combat and snapped at Olano that her party is asking to lower taxes when it is going to raise water taxes in Galicia due to a law drawn up with Alberto Núñez Feijóo in the Xunta.

When the vice president asked her interlocutors if they are going to approve the new government measures, escapism changed sides.

If Calviño saw them with the right flank, Marlaska fell from everywhere.

Above all, due to the words of the President of the Government endorsing the actions of the Moroccan security forces, "lacking in humanity", according to the popular José Antonio Bermúdez de Castro, who demanded that "the facts be clarified".

The always temperate PNV thrashed this time, through the mouth of Iñigo Barandiaran: "These people have not been treated as human beings and there is no way to justify it, much less for a Prime Minister to do it."

Jon Iñarritu focused on asking Marlaska to assess the performance of the Moroccan security forces from the police point of view.

And there he met Houdini.

The minister condolences for the dead immigrants and also for the 50 civil guards and the 140 Moroccan gendarmes wounded in the event.

“An attack on our borders” is, in the language of the Government, the attempt to jump the fence.

Marlaska repeated it insistently, as well as the argument that the only ones responsible are "the mafias that traffic in human beings."

The minister came to brand as "false" that Moroccan gendarmes had entered Spanish territory.

From the seat, the EH Bildu deputy simulated a camera with his hands to reply that there are images that show it.

In the midst of all these bonfires, the Government at least managed not to offer any fissure in the face of the usual attacks by the opposition to put discord between the two formations of the Executive.

The PP tried it when asking the Minister of Consumption and general coordinator of IU, Alberto Garzón, about the NATO summit.

Garzón also showed his prowess in the art of escapism.

It is not only that he avoided any phrase that could have made the socialists uncomfortable, he even ended up drawing applause from him when he boasted about the role of the PCE in the recovery of democracy.

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