Around 11 p.m. last night, the police began to charge after masked groups threw bottles and flares at the riot police. Charges that caused the protest to dissolve and the altercations to move to the surrounding streets, destroying furniture in their wake. With a result, for the moment, of twelve detainees and nine slightly injured, among them a police officer. At the intersection of Ferraz and Marqués de Urquijo streets, the epicenter of the protests in recent days, two thousand people gathered again, according to data provided by the Government Delegation. More than in the last two days, but much less than the 8,000 who gathered on the day the pact between the PSOE and Junts was announced.
Despite the fact that the Police concentrated its enormous deployment of troops around the Congress of Deputies to guarantee the development of the first session of the investiture, the truth is that there were hardly any concentrations around the Parliament building; , they moved, again, to Ferraz Street, near the PSOE headquarters where late at night there were riot police charges.
The protest, following the previous trend, took place in Ferraz with an atmosphere full of tension although without incidents during the first two hours. The chants that resonated give proof of that atmosphere: “It’s not a headquarters, it’s a brothel” –although last night the inflatable dolls from the previous day did not appear–, “You don’t have balls with the Moors” –directed at the police officers– and “Whoever votes is fucking red” – to combat the cold that marked the night in Ferraz. “Normality,” in the jargon of the protesters, was broken when around 11 p.m. the first firecrackers began to be heard, as the riot police put on their helmets and took positions.
That was the most complicated moment of the day because, on the contrary, barely fifty people gathered around the Congress. The deployment of the Police, similar to that of high-risk football matches, such as the one played on the 7th of this month between Atlético de Madrid and Celtic Glasgow or the one held a day later between Real Madrid and Sporting de Braga. This Wednesday’s protest on the outskirts of the Congress of Deputies remained a Sunday football party among friends. About 25 people, according to the Government Delegation, at one end of the Carrera de San Jerónimo, and another 150 protesters on the other side, in the Plaza de Cánovas del Castillo, who experienced the high point of the protest when the leader of the extreme right , Santiago Abascal, left the chamber to address them and encourage them to go to Ferraz.
But before the president of Vox came to harangue the protesters shouting “No to the coup d’état”, the hours passed very slowly next to the Neptune fountain. At around mid-morning, coinciding with the start of the parliamentary session, the few applauses that were heard were dedicated to a bus that the ultra-Catholic organization HazteOír took to the streets with a photograph of Pedro Sánchez dressed as Hitler. The boos, however, were distributed. There were accusations against the socialist deputies as “traitors”, against the police for “not putting up fences on the border” and against the press, “the Spanish one”, as “manipulative”.
Dressed in Spanish flags, they raised just a dozen banners on which you could read the slogans that have become popular during the protests against the amnesty: “Felón dictator” or “Sanchismo dictatorship.” In another they left black on white: “Sánchez, I vote for Vox, you say we are extreme right, but those who vote for you are sell-outs.”
