The PNV speaker in Congress, Aitor Esteban, a veteran of 20 years in the House of Representatives and several awards from parliamentary journalists for his skills and talent, appears overwhelmed and angry in a hallway of the House of Commons. He mumbles some complaints and doesn't stop. It's Tuesday in mid-January and falls outside the weekly meeting of the Speaker's Council, the body in which the organization and dates are decided together with the board. Esteban just left the meeting early because he was tired of the long speeches from the new PP spokesman Miguel Tellado. It is the second week in a row that he has achieved this. Tellado's tone, the disqualification of his opponents in meetings with a theoretically more technical than political aspect, have not only ended Esteban's patience. All other factions, with the exception of Vox, admit that they are annoyed by the attitude of Alberto Núñez Feijóo's loyal collaborator.
The appearances of the members of the government and the topics to be discussed in the plenary sessions and commissions are determined in the Spokespersons' Committee of the Congress after the committee has monitored and approved the initiatives. Typically, each speaker gave a short speech, but it did not last much longer than half an hour. Until the end of November, Tellado arrived as Cuca Gamarra's successor as spokesman for the PP. Since then, there have been complaints and disputes about the attitude, tone and duration of Tellado's lectures, as EL PAÍS confirmed to representatives of the parties present. The spokesman for the Socialists themselves, Patxi López, admitted publicly, without elaborating: “We miss Cuca Gamarra.”
Tellado, according to consensus versions from the other groups, devotes itself to what they describe as “rallies” of up to 15 minutes. In a closed forum, without public or journalists, the PP spokesman uses his political arguments to attack the government and its partners in a tone that all sources describe as very aggressive and on issues that are not even on the agenda. The spokesmen of the other groups are perplexed and assure that something like this has never happened before: that the same speeches and political attacks that are used for public disputes are used in an internal meeting.
Those present at these meetings describe attitudes such as when Tellado disqualified Sumar's speaker Marta Lois and told her that “her party will soon fire her.” The anger is so great that EH Bildu spokesman Mertxe Aizpurua asked in a recent meeting whether it was not necessary to evaluate intervention times as in public debates. Some of the speakers interviewed say they noticed signs of discomfort among other PP members present at the meetings due to their speaker's belligerent attitude.
All people contacted by EL PAÍS emphasize that Tellado's worst attacks are carried out by the president of the Congress, the socialist Francina Armengol, one of the PP's favorite targets in its strategy to undermine the legitimacy of a chamber in which it is in the minority . According to several present, Tellado habitually disqualifies Armengol's actions as “sloppy” and in a derogatory tone, be it the decision to introduce translators and earphones for the use of official languages in plenary sessions and commissions, the problems in the execution of the contracts that make this possible, the Electing a person they trust as chief advocate of the Cortes or transferring some debates to the Senate due to work in the Chamber.
In public, the PP spokesman referred to President Pedro Sánchez as “23rd. Government minister” and as a “bought referee”. He accuses her of having concealed for days a report from the Justice Commission's lawyers that raised doubts about the constitutionality of the planned amnesty law. The lawyer who signed this document made it clear to the Commission that this accusation was false. Tellado appeared before the press after this correction, but to intensify his attacks against Armengol. In addition, he wanted to raise the issue at a meeting of speakers convened on Thursday without the presence of Armengol, who was on sick leave, until the first vice president, the socialist Alfonso Rodríguez Gómez de Celis, prevented him, saying the matter was not on the agenda.
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The president declined to comment on what happened in the chamber's internal meetings. Parliamentary sources said that Armengol had asked Tellado for a face-to-face meeting weeks ago, with no response so far.
Sources from the PP indicate that the other groups are trying to silence him, using as examples the performance of Gómez de Celis at the last meeting of speakers or the proposal of the EH Bildu spokesman to estimate the intervention times. “The PP will not stop denouncing, in all the institutions in which it is represented, especially in the Chamber of Deputies, the concessions made by Pedro Sánchez to the independence movement, as is the case with the amnesty law,” respond the same sources through complaints about the behavior of their spokesman be questioned. Tellado, they add, “will continue to seek full explanations each time the President continues to twist or manipulate the rules of the House of Representatives to favor the administration and bend Congress to the President's dictates.”
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