To hell with Sánchez as prime minister (Francisco Rosell in El Debate)

Francisco Rosell's column in El Debate, titled "To hell with Sánchez as prime minister", argues that Pedro Sánchez governs against Parliament and seeks to cling to power through the 29-N elections, using a meme about the Pope and hell as its guiding thread.

The Serbian-American writer **Charles Simic**, author of "The World Doesn't End" (1990 Pulitzer Prize) and "The Monster Loves His Labyrinth", held that humor was the best device for pointing out "the ridiculous dimension of authority". From that angle, the column by **Francisco Rosell** published in **El Debate** under the title "To hell with Sánchez as prime minister" opens with a joke circulating on social media. The meme shows Pedro Sánchez next to the Pope, who warns him that he is dangerously close to hell. Faced with that admonition, the prime minister asks eagerly: "But, Your Holiness, I'll still be President down there, won't I?".

Jokes aside, the text argues that Sánchez is not one to sit waiting for fate, but rather goes out to meet it. That is why, according to the author, he gives the present no respite and persists in turning Spain into an inferno on earth by exploiting people's antiestéticar ahead of the **29-N** elections. Either to stay in La Moncloa, the prime minister's official residence, in order to complete his self-coup against the constitutional order. Or to govern from the opposition by sabotaging a potential PP and Vox cabinet through stirring up the streets with the rubble of his eight years in power, after having dismantled the rule of law and abandoned the nation to its internal and foreign enemies.

## The Palencia PSOE and the mass resignation

The column focuses on an internal episode within Spain's Socialist Party (PSOE). The socialist **Álvaro Bilbao**, removed as lead candidate for Palencia in the 29-N elections to make way for a Sánchez loyalist, has triggered the mass resignation of the entire slate. Bilbao, according to the text, has stated: "in a few years, we will look back and all of us will ask ourselves how it was possible that such injustices were committed within the PSOE and only a few raised their voices". For the author, that episode illustrates the logic of an autocrat who rules against Parliament and denies democratic alternation.

The comparison Rosell draws is with the Franco-era courtier **Jesús Fueyo**, an organic intellectual of the regime, when he answered the question "Minister? Even Minister of the Navy, if need be!". Against that legitimate aspiration to power, the text contrasts a Sánchez who, according to his thesis, sees himself presiding over Hell after rigging the vote against Satan himself. Like the ones, the author claims, he staged twice to become secretary general, while in the meantime he tried to dodge his ousting by stuffing ballots into a ballot box behind the scenes.

## 45 million for student residences and a university statute

On the governing front, the column describes a combination of multiplying clientelist spending without having General State Budgets, shamelessly advertised at the so-called "electoral Tuesdays", alongside measures that, in the author's view, deepen the annihilation of the State. The Council of Ministers, according to the text, once again illustrated this anomaly while mocking the Electoral Board after reprimanding Sánchez and threatening him with a fine the author compares to the one imposed on **Cristiano Ronaldo** for leaving the national team's training camp.

Among the approved measures is the **45 million** allocation to create **2,000 places** in university residences, in a government the text considers a lame-duck one whose housing policy has shipwrecked spectacularly. Alongside it, a University Students' Statute slipped in almost unnoticed which, via royal decree with Parliament closed, develops the right to strike for students who will be able to miss class and be exempt from exams when strikes are called, even on flimsy grounds unrelated to their faculty, with no limits on this and no compensation mechanisms for those whose rights are abusa.

The author stresses that Spanish universities are light years away from those topping the international quality rankings, in line with the failure of pre-university levels assessed by the **OECD** in the latest **Pisa** report, and with faculties handing out degrees not worth the paper they are printed on. Sánchez's priority, he argues, is not restoring the standard of the public university so that families do not have to take out a mortgage to fix it through private institutions, but establishing that right to strike through soft legislation that makes university walkouts possible whenever the mood strikes.

## Trade unions, ETA and the "grandchildren law"

The text links that law to the trade unions, describing them as heavily subsidized and saying they will find in that university a breeding ground for future full-time officials spared from actual work, after reducing their working hours over these eight years to little more than the **twenty-four hours** of this **11 November** for their Political General Strike against the opposition, in which they will go all out to heat up the election campaign. Meanwhile, the author claims, those university students serve as cannon fodder for a government that promotes harassment campaigns against its rivals such as Madrid's regional president **Ayuso**.

On territorial matters, the column notes that, since ETA no longer kills but still rules, as **María San Gil** pointed out on the **15th anniversary** of the end of ETA's terrorism, the socialist spokesman **Patxi López** boasts of walking the streets of the Basque Country more calmly than those of Madrid. It also mentions the reproach from the mother of **Joseba Pagaza**, murdered in **2005**: "Patxi, you will say and do many things that will chill my blood". And it argues that Sánchez has flung open the prison doors to ETA convicts in order to become prime minister while losing elections.

Alongside this, the occupant of La Moncloa persists, on this **ninetieth anniversary** of the left's electoral fraud in the February **1936** elections, in doing the same by manipulating the electoral roll through the rigged "grandchildren law" (a law granting Spanish citizenship to descendants of exiles). Without guaranteeing the status of descendants of exiles or even that they were Spanish, Sánchez seeks to inject himself with the vote of those who are so grateful to him for having gifted them a European passport. In this regard, the text asks whether **Conde-Pumpido** is once again legitimizing this new corruption with a Constitutional Court that, under his leadership, is more of a "abusa" than a guarantor of the Constitution.

## The Fuenlabrada kiss and the closing of the column

The column closes with the strategic retreat of the man "deeply in love" of April **2024** after his vvife was placed under investigation, which degenerated into a sewer, and with the kiss in **Fuenlabrada** to his "lucky one", which may turn into the disease of that name after moving in a matter of hours from "The Force of Love" to "They Won't Stop Us". The stench of sanchismo, he writes, is such that it prevents some from seeing an inferno in which all Sánchez cares about, as in the joke with the Pope, is whether he will be able to go on presiding over it in the afterlife as he does here. Faced with this, he concludes, **Feijóo** and **Abascal** would do well to be good.