The question to Pedro Sánchez about the quarantine that made Alberto Fernández smile

(Madrid-Special Envoy) The Spanish journalist was halfway through the question, addressed to President Pedro Sánchez, when Alberto Fernández looked at the entourage of the Argentinian press, to his right, shrug his shoulders and he smirked.

The response of the Spanish president, to whom the administration of the pandemic almost cost him the government coalition, sounded to Fernández’s measure. “I ask the opposition to show consistency,” said Sánchez. And he added: “The state of alarm is the past.”

Like two mirrors, and with a delay of a few weeks, Sánchez faces Supreme Court ruling in Spain this could bring him a political and legal setback similar to the one the Supreme Court gave him with the unconstitutionality of the DNU which spoke out against the suspension of courses in the city of Buenos Aires, a resolution adapted to Horacio Rodríguez Larreta .

In Spain, the Supreme Court is due to rule in the coming days if it empowers the autonomous governments to re-apply the curfew – as some are asking for the health situation around the coronavirus – or if, on the contrary, it asks for an extension of the state of alarm as an umbrella for this nocturnal measure that expired on the weekend, which had been voted by Parliament for six months and which forces Sánchez to return to the center of decision-making.

The Spaniard says each jurisdiction has legal tools to fight the virus.

That tight vote, they say here in Madrid, forced Sánchez to go for votes: a move which, they add, almost fatally wounded the ruling coalition.

“The autonomous communities have many instruments to deal with the pandemic. The state of alarm is the past. You have to look to the future. And the future is called vaccination and vaccination. We are 99 days away from obtaining group immunity, ”explained the local president before the journalistic request, who consulted on his decision in the event that the country’s highest court gives him a setback similar to the one Fernández received from the court.

Harassed by last year’s health crisis, which forced him to put in place a state of alert and negotiate nightly restrictions with communities, the Spanish president now clings to an open-minded policy, motivated, to a large extent, by the need to attract tourism. But on the contrary, there are municipal authorities who are asking him, once again, for more important measures. This is what the head of state does not want. Return to Parliament and must negotiate with the opposition. This is what he fears that justice will force him to do.

In Argentina, Fernández faces a similar dilemma with Juntos por el Cambio, after the court’s setback, in Congress. Although in fact it presents different nuances of the situation in Spain. The president wants more power to decide more closures in some areas and some sectors want more autonomy to maintain the openings. This Monday, Casa Rosada sent the Senate the bill which, according to the opposition, gives it “super powers” to manage the pandemic.

Last year, the president and Rodríguez Larreta negotiated the measures until the link was broken. Fernández smiled in Argentinian journalists’ faces because Spain’s internal tensions reminded him of his own domestic issues that he had so far tried to forget during his European tour.

At midnight on Saturday, Spain ended the state of alarm. In Madrid, thousands of young people took to the balconies to celebrate the climax of the curfew. And they met in the main parks. Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the autonomous community of the Spanish capital, is a fervent promoter of “freedoms”.

The official report from that country’s health ministry on Friday counted 78,895 deaths from the coronavirus. Eighty-six are the average daily deaths, in the past 24 hours there have been only 1,349 new infections, in a country of nearly 50 million people, and 13% of the population has been vaccinated with one dose and 5% with two doses.