(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Sánchez puede ser mucho peor)
The ferocious campaign against the VOX party, which had its most intense moments between the municipal and the general elections, has not subsided in intensity; it has changed in its forms. When everyone should by now have accepted its failure.
The objective was to finish off this party, and what it has achieved is to demonstrate that a very firm electoral floor has already consolidated and does not give way even under the most adverse conditions possible.
Neither with 90% of the media announcing its disappearance and inventing division, internal discord and desertions, nor with the various private campaigns of assorted enemies, has the desired effect been produced.
Few parties outside the government would have withstood so firmly a campaign so barbaric and intense — one that there has not been in Spain even against parties that defend terrorism.
That does not mean it did no damage. Some of the damage was a boomerang. Because the dent of the asphyxiating harassment of VOX was enough to do great harm to Núñez Feijóo, so much as to deny him the government.
And it was precisely the campaign of the People’s Party and its media that demanded VOX give the PP the majority the latter claimed to have and never had. The self-inflicted defeat, aimed at VOX’s backside, will go down in the annals of blunders in electoral-strategy design.
Never has a party that had won the elections in alliance devoted itself so intensely to harming its only possible ally, to the point of depriving itself of victory.
Not everyone in the other parties has understood this, and of course there are many in several of them, on left and right, who dream of a Spain without VOX, whether by harassment and demolition or by outlawing it.
It is quite possible that there are fools in the PP to whom the outlawing of VOX would seem convenient.
Let them be careful, because if Sánchez goes off to the Valley of the Fallen to do a photo shoot among skulls and bones, he does so, of course, to use the dead in the most miserable way for his propaganda.
But also to visualize that, faced with the catastrophe his government confronts — with a mountain of unheard-of corruption scandals and with Sánchez’s own wife, Begoña Gómez, at the center of the whole plot — he is preparing for a total confrontation with such a civil-war character that it will already be a civil war, though for the moment a cold one.
The propaganda machinery set in motion for the visit to the Valley of the Fallen, which provided from a single official source the images of Sánchez and company advancing through the basilica and the tunnels like conquerors and owners, makes the warlike language clear.
Meanwhile, the friendly media, the most militant ones and the others of more surreptitious propaganda, were again setting their sights on VOX and the «concord laws», which in two regions where this party governs with the PP have replaced the «democratic memory laws» of the Popular Front-style, revanchist sectarianism.
In reality, those concord laws merely recover a spirit of the Transition that treats equally the sides of a war they consider a common tragedy of all Spaniards.
This spirit was abolished, prohibited by Zapatero as soon as he came to government after the 11-M bombings. And today it is a persecuted spirit, because for today’s Popular Front-ists, for the government and all the media of the left’s hegemonic lies, there is only one impeccable side and one demonic side.
The media all ring out that this conflict is because VOX denies relatives the right to recover the bodies of the war’s victims. Which is a miserable lie, whoever the announcer saying it may be. VOX is not against a dignified burial for those who remain in a mass grave. It defends that right for all. For the victims of the Popular Front and for the Nationalist ones, whose remains are often reburied or abandoned in the grave when the Democratic Memory crews identify them as «Francoists».
VOX is against the Democratic Memory Law that serves to finance an immense network of rackets of civil-war revanchism. But above all because it is a totalitarian law that wants to divide and set Spaniards against each other even more, and to impose lies as official and obligatory truths, and to prohibit, persecute and punish truths because they are not to power’s liking.
Sánchez can use that law for a head-on clash that makes it impossible to debate and investigate all the countless crimes of the various criminal schemes developed under his government.
The radical application of Sánchez’s Democratic Memory Law could turn it into something very similar to that Law Against Fascism that the criminal Nicolás Maduro and the no less criminal Delcy Rodríguez pulled out of their sleeve — both with very close contacts with the Spanish government through Rodríguez Zapatero.
That law, just passed by the narco-communist dictatorship, gives entirely free rein to seize, fine and detain — and, in the case of Venezuela, to torture and murder — in absolute arbitrariness, anyone suspected of fascism, of sympathies with conservative forces, or of criticism of Bolivarian socialism.
It is rightly said that the immense majority of Spaniards no longer respond to the left’s lures with hackneyed campaigns against fascism or Francoism. That is true.
But an absolutely incompetent opposition has allowed and helped to consolidate the PSOE’s maneuver of regime change to impose laws with brutal mechanisms of coercion.
They are laws so that a dictator or a regime with an unscrupulous autocrat can have all the power, of absolutely arbitrary use, to persecute the entire opposition it declares an enemy.
They are laws against freedom, against the truth and for dictatorship. And with a tsunami of corruption cases and now manifest diversions, embezzlement of national and European funds that reach his government and his own home, Sánchez is capable of anything.
If he has no serious and convincing warnings to dissuade him, he is capable of trying to threaten all of society in order to keep power, which is now the only thing that grants impunity to himself, to his wife and to that entire council of ministers already under a hundred thousand suspicions. Sánchez may be close to being much worse than until now.
Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.
