The populists demand his resignation from Congress and aim directly at Pedro Sánchez
The case of the Koldo masks keeps getting more complicated and the PP wants to take advantage of it to wear down the Spanish government. For this reason, the popular people have intensified the pressure on the socialists with the focus on the president of the Congress, Francina Armengol, for the Balearic branch of the case. They criticize that the government of the islands acquired a batch of “inadequate” masks through José Luis Ábalos’ ex-advisor, Koldo García, paying 3.7 million euros. And, what is worse, that he did it knowing that they were not for sanitary use, which Armengol denies. For this reason, this Monday the people of Alberto Núñez Feijóo have presented a letter to the parliament in which they request the resignation of Armengol, as the spokesman of the parliamentary group, Miguel Tellado, already advanced this Sunday.
The PP’s resignation petition considers Armengol as an “essential accomplice of the deception”, although the Armengol team rejects any involvement in any kind of deception. “It can’t go on for one more second,” Tellado reiterated in statements to the media, insisting on what he said this Sunday that “he is doing great harm to the institution.” According to the people, the case of the Koldo masks is causing the Spanish government to be “in shambles”, as Feijóo himself said. The reference to the Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez, is obvious because they say that “everyone involved” in this plot is “very close” to him.
Ayuso joins the attack and accuses Sánchez of acting “like a dictatorship”
The president of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has also followed this line. He joined the offensive by saying at a breakfast at Club Siglo XXI that Sánchez is acting “like a dictatorship” by refusing to appear in the Senate. For this reason, he has said that it is “unacceptable” and has demanded that Francina Armengol resign. According to her, “it is evidence” that the president of Congress “benefited from a corrupt plot that has taken advantage of the suffering of the Spanish in the pandemic and the resources of the Balearic Islands, whose money has been thrown into the trash without explanation “.
The Spanish government tries to protect Ábalos and defends Armengol
At the same time, the Spanish government is trying to make its shield with Ábalos work. The Minister of Inclusion and Social Security, Elma Saiz, has assured in an interview with TVE that the resignation request of the PP to Francina Armengol is “totally unjustified”. Thus, he has accused the popular people of “trying to smear”, “expand” and “slander”. In the same sense, the representative of the commons Aina Vidal has expressed to RNE, who has accused the PP of wanting to “take advantage” of the case and has compared this with the popular action of the terrorist attacks of 11-M, the 2004, when “they took advantage of it electorally”. At the same time, he described the conservatives’ way of acting as “disastrous”: “They are neither judges, nor is this a show, nor some kind of theater scene”, he concluded.
