What happened this Thursday in the Congress of Deputies goes far beyond the anecdote, elevated to the category of democratic fraud by the top leaders of the PP, including Casado and the gentleman from Murcia. What happened on Thursday is an unsurpassed example of the right to make a fool of oneself exercised very successfully, as always, by both Deputy Casero and the top of his party.
Pretending to turn the deputy's mistake when voting into a system failure only makes sense from the point of view of a cheating strategy: We allege this and if it goes through, there is no need to repeat the vote, the vote is changed and that's it, we win the vote, we get rid of the labor reform agreed by unions and employers, we get rid of the benefits it contains without regard to the rights of workers and companies, we defeat the government and, incidentally, we can hinder or even prevent the arrival of European funds.
Pure classic patriotism of the right that recalls Montoro's words: If we don't govern, let the country sink, then we will raise it.
But what happened is much more serious. A careful reading of what happened allows us to understand that they knew perfectly well that they were going to win the vote if they managed to get their far-fetched thesis to prosper, the one about the computer failure, to the point where they made the deputy go to Congress in a hurry from who knows where (Extremadura, Madrid, Ciudad Real).
The question is clear: What importance did Casero's mistake have if the vote of the two UPN deputies, as they stated to the media during that day, would be in favor of the validation of the reform? The answer is just as clear: Because they knew that those two votes were theirs.
Again two traitors and two votes, as with the tamayazo. Again the practice of despicable maneuvers from the point of view of a full and consolidated democracy. Again, almost 19 years later, they tried to rewrite one of the most ignominious pages of our recent history, with the same main protagonist but changing his partner, in a shameful and repugnant way.
What happened on Thursday has revealed a perfectly orchestrated maneuver that was truncated by the clumsiness of a deputy who realized that with his mistake, which he is now trying to disguise as a computer problem, he was breaking the miserable strategy hatched by his bosses. A strategy that, to add insult to injury, had his main ally in Navarra as a collateral victim.
It was not a computer problem, it was a mistake and Casero and the top of the Popular Party know it. A mistake that the deputy was fully aware of and hence the phrases attributed to him after having realized it.
What happened on Thursday left a portrait of PP and VOX voting the same as those they wrongly call coup plotters and pro-ETA members. What happened on Thursday shows that time has not passed for the PP but that the PP has passed through time and there it remains in Génova 13 without moving with the same practices and the same hammer, without still assuming that there is a legitimate government that agrees in a historical moment, due to the exceptional circumstances that converge in it, measures in favor of the people of this country for the good of Spain, that Spain that they insist on considering as their own, expropriating it from those of us who think differently.
On Thursday, as Zapatero said, Spain won and the PP lost and I add: on Thursday democracy won, the trap lost.
Manuel Fajardo, Senator for Lanzarote and La Graciosa
