The main axis of Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s intervention in this week’s investiture debate was the amnesty that could be approved by a future government of Pedro Sánchez. He charged against this considering it the principle of the dissolution of Spain with the argument that it would break the equality of all citizens, a fact that in turn would break the foundations of the rule of law. Equality, a word that the leader of the PP pronounced up to twenty times.
He did not specify what he meant by equality; he used the concept in an abstract, absolute way, a strong idea that is almost impossible to oppose. Like justice or freedom. Who does not consider them laudable and necessary aspirations?
He ended up applying the concept/label to many fields, from economics to education. But above all the leader of the PP wanted to refer to equality before the law, that is to say, the right of all citizens to receive identical treatment from justice. The obvious message of the Galician politician is that the amnesty for pro-independence leaders means erasing a crime, something that would not be available to the rest of the citizens. Blatant inequality. We will leave aside that justice, to be such, must know how to apply, also, adapting to the circumstances and seeking to solve problems, not aggravate them. In other words, unequal duty to know when it operates for the benefit of society.
During these weeks of intense debate on amnesty, previous examples have already been brought up. For example, the tax amnesty of the government of Mariano Rajoy, in 2012. In addition to highlighting that others before Sánchez made comparable decisions, the reference serves to go beyond its validity as a precedent. Precisely from the angle of equality so strongly defended by Feijóo.
By definition, tax amnesty is much more difficult to justify than politics. To begin with, it is the daughter of inequality (in this case economic): several tens of thousands of taxpayers, who are assumed to already have the status of privileged for having a voluminous income or wealth, receive the additional prize of making them emerge (and with these their tax crimes) with almost no economic cost, and certainly with complete criminal laundering.
In clear contrast to the majority of citizens whom the Tax Agency controls thanks to their payrolls. A difference in treatment for those who were able to regularize without further problems. With the bitter surcharge that many of them were also protagonists of many other violations of the penal code, especially those related to political corruption.
No one will remember Feijóo raising his voice against his government colleagues in the face of this tarnishing of equality. Did the Rajoy government do it to help its friends, as the opposition accused? Or was it because the State urgently needed income to deal with the economic crisis, as the government and the PP said?
There are also actions similar to the mandates of the PSOE. And without the need to go back to the tax amnesties of the mid-eighties of the last century, of the first government of Felipe González, now so critical of this class of measures. We are talking about something much more recent, with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, 2010 and being Minister of Finance Elena Salgado. Something worthy of mention happened in the circumstances of the current political debate. The ministry received a list of almost 700 Spanish residents holding bank accounts in Switzerland, at the HSBC bank, the famous “Falciani list”. This included some of the greatest representatives of the country’s economic and financial elite.
But the Treasury, instead of ordering inspections and reporting potential fraudsters to the courts, decided to send them polite requests to regularize their situation. They did, fines and, most importantly, criminal charges were avoided.
Once again, a clear contrast with the situation of the majority of taxpayers, who have never enjoyed such benign treatment. When the Tax Agency detects something irregular, it opens an inspection and if in the end the existence of the crime emerges, it sends the complaint to the Prosecutor’s Office. The government did it to protect its friends, as the PP said, by the way, not at the time of the events, but years later, when they were already in government and the socialists accused them of the same thing because of Cristóbal’s tax amnesty ride? To avoid a clash with a large sector of the country’s economic elite? Why was he afraid that justice would give him a toss up for the way in which he had obtained the HSBC lists, as Zapatero’s executive said at the time?
The existence of the Basque and Navarrese regional regime, undoubtedly politically legitimate, is another example of this inequality, in this case of citizens and territories, which Feijóo also did not include in his inflamed intervention in Congress. In his desire to show himself extremely concerned about equality, he rightly recalled the problems suffered by many people in rural areas with more difficult access to basic services.
But he did not mention, either, the inequality with taxes, in effect for almost two decades, from the time of Madrid president Esperanza Aguirre to that of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, among some privileged residents in the Community of Madrid and those of the rest of the State. And this thanks to discrimination, that is to say inequality, between a community that benefits from its capital status and the rest. It seems that for some this inequality is an absolute which, however, ends up being relative depending on the people it affects.
