In almost every speech inside and outside Spain, Pedro Sánchez reinforces the progressive turn that began in the debate on the state of the nation in July, when he announced taxes on large energy companies and banks.
In New York, shortly after confirming to the journalists accompanying him on the trip that he is seriously studying a tax on large fortunes, another milestone in that turn, Sánchez has given a speech with clear left-wing content in which he has vindicated himself and Gabriel Boric, who accompanied him, as the political heirs of Salvador Allende, one of the myths of the world left, who died during the coup of September 11, 1973 that ended with a democratically elected president to establish a bloody military dictatorship.
The act was to commemorate 50 years of a historic speech, that of Allende at the UN in 1972. Sánchez believes that many of the Chilean's proposals are still valid today.
And he feels like one more heir to that battle.
"Today, as progressive leaders, we must lead the march into the future based on the principles of equality, freedom and social justice," the president stated.
Sánchez has drawn many parallels with the situation in 1973 and with the positions that he and Boric defend.
“There is the circumstance, perhaps the parallelism, that the current context of transformation in so many fields —the technological revolution, the energy transition, digitalization— coincides with an offensive by reactionary movements on a world scale that live by feeding fear and the uncertainty between our societies”, explained the president.
“Allende said in his speech: ours is a permanent fight for the establishment of social freedoms, of economic democracy, through the full exercise of political freedoms.
Today, our collective goal is based on the same ideal: to protect the rights of the weak against the abuse of the strong.
Distribute the burdens and ensure that those who have the most and benefit from this situation commit and contribute to the extent that corresponds to them, ”Sánchez has sentenced, marking at all times that parallelism with a great reference on the left.
The turn of the Spanish president's speech is increasingly evident, much more so if one takes into account that just a few months ago the PSOE ruled out a tax on banks and now it is implanting it or rejecting a tax on large fortunes and now it is studying it.
Sánchez finishes over and over again the idea of the struggle between the economic powers and the progressives.
“Nothing is more corrosive to democracy than the suspicion that citizens choose who governs every four years, but not who really commands;
who, in the shadows, controls the springs of power.
Pointing out this threat does not make us dangerous radicals;
it strengthens us, in fact, in our democratic convictions.
It is not the left that loses with disaffection when it is verified that certain powers are above good and evil: it is democracy as a whole that is impoverished.
Hopefully the right wing will understand it one day, ”he said on the spot.
The president has insisted on the idea that the current struggle is very similar to Allende's.
“The conflicts between the economic macrostructures and the states and peoples continue to be, as they were half a century ago, an evident factor of distortion.
We learned it during the pandemic and we are suffering it now with the energy crisis.
Global organizations beyond all control continue to condition debates and mark the future of markets that function inefficiently.
Here too, the progressive agenda must show determination, at a time when, as has been shown, people turn their eyes towards the state to contain uncertainty”, concluded Sánchez.
The Spanish president has had in this tribute to Allende a new milestone in the turn of his speech, increasingly concentrated on clearly progressive messages far from the search for consensus with the great economic powers that dominated the first part of the legislature, when the President opened the political course with all the great leaders of the Ibex 35 sitting in the front row.
Sánchez does not stop taking care of the big businessmen who want to invest, and in fact this Thursday he will be in New York with the big investment funds with interests in Spain, but in his public speeches he concentrates on messages that place the right with the economic powers and the progressive coalition government with the working middle class
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