Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, and his electoral rival, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, have accused each other of failing to protect women, making pacts with disreputable allies and lying about the economy in an ill-tempered televised debate. .
The two rivals interrupted, spoke over and aimed slights at each other in a series of testy exchanges, with the Socialist prime minister appearing more irritable on a night that was one of his final chances to rein in the poll lead of Mr Feijóo’s conservative People’s Party.
Mr Sánchez called a snap general election after suffering an emphatic defeat in regional and local elections at the end of May. Most polls suggest that he is on course to lose on July 23rd, but the race is tightening and Mr Feijóo would probably need the support of the hard-right Vox party to take office.
The most heated exchanges came when Mr Sánchez highlighted “shameful” pacts that the PP has already made with Vox to form municipal and regional governments, noting that the hard-right party disputes the notion of gender-based violence.
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“In this country there are male chauvinists who murder women, and you are making a pact with a sexist party that does not condemn male violence against women. That has consequences, Mr Feijóo,” Mr Sánchez said.
Mr Feijóo responded by highlighting one of the coalition government’s biggest errors: the passage last year of a botched sexual consent law that resulted in more than 1,100 convicted sex offenders having their sentences reduced and 117 being released early.
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“You will go down in history as the prime minister who signed the ‘only yes means yes’ law,” Mr Feijóo said, referring to the legislation. “Those male chauvinists who raped women are out on the street because of you.”
Mr Sánchez acknowledged the law as an error that the government had corrected but, in a reference to Vox, told Mr Feijóo: “You’re trading rights for votes, principles for seats.” In a response to Mr Sánchez’s warnings about the danger of a PP-Vox national coalition, which would bring the hard-right into government for the first time since the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975, Mr Feijóo appealed to voters to give the PP an absolute majority.
“I want to be prime minister, but not in any way possible,” Mr Feijóo said. “A strong majority, without the need to rely on the extremes, is essential to move forward.” Mr Feijóo told Mr Sánchez that if the prime minister’s Socialist Party won the most seats but fell short of a majority then the PP would abstain from the investiture vote so it could form a minority government.
He asked Mr Sánchez if he would make the same commitment to the PP, enabling it to govern without Vox, and the prime minister dodged the question. Mr Sánchez came under attack, as he has throughout the campaign, for his own alliances with Basque and Catalan separatists whose votes he has needed to pass signature reforms to pensions, labour law and housing.
While Mr Feijóo said Mr Sánchez’s party lavished “affection” on EH Bildu, a Basque party led by a convicted member of the disbanded Eta terrorist group, he said “we are sick and tired of the arrogance with which you treat the main opposition party”.
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The two men also clashed over starkly different visions of the economy. Mr Sánchez repeated his oft-used phrase that, with record employment, the economy was “going like a motorbike”. But Mr Feijóo said that showed “a lack of respect for the Spanish people”, many of whom were struggling with expensive supermarket bills and rising mortgage costs.
When Mr Feijóo criticised Mr Sánchez for increasing Spain’s public debt, the prime minister pointed out that the costs of the pandemic and a war in Europe had played a big role. “Mr Feijóo never talks about Ukraine, about the damaging effects [the war] has had,” the prime minister said. “On what planet do you live?”
Mr Sánchez then said that Mr Feijóo, who led the Galicia region from 2009 to 2022, had overseen an increase in its public debt, something the PP leader said was flat wrong. “You should know that. But you don’t,” Mr Feijóo said. “And if you do, you’re lying.”
In his final remarks, Mr Sánchez referred to Vox leader Santiago Abascal and said that Spaniards had a choice to make. “Does Spain continue to move forward, as it has done for the last 40 years, or do Mr Abascal and Mr Feijóo take us into a dark time-warp that will leave us who knows where?” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023