“Another match ball saved,” they celebrate in the Moncloa and in Ferraz, after the Congressional Justice Commission yesterday gave the green light to the Amnesty law proposal agreed upon by the PSOE, Junts and ERC, and with the signature also from Sumar, Bildu and PNV. “It’s a match and almost a championship,” they highlight, after clearing up the uncertainty that Carles Puigdemont’s refusal to accept the wording of the rule plunged them into a month ago. The new guarantees on the scope of the amnesty assumed by Pedro Sánchez, referring to the crimes of terrorism and high treason that now weigh on the former president of the Generalitat, facilitated the white smoke.
Always under a formidable political storm, the norm will return next Thursday to the plenary session of Congress, where this time it will have an absolute majority of 178 seats for its approval, before being sent to the Senate, where the absolute majority of the Popular Party still claims delay its processing for another two months, but without the option of dynamiting it. The Gordian knot of the legislature, and of Sánchez’s new mandate, would thus be untied.
The President of the Government – ??who yesterday continued in São Paulo the tour that later landed in Santiago, Chile – thus sees the serious obstacle that threatened to collapse the legislature, barely one hundred days after his last inauguration and in full shock by the scandal of alleged corruption of a Koldo case that spreads its tentacles through the Government, and already sets its objective on the approval of new general budgets of the State for this 2024 with which it seeks to provide political and economic stability for its new mandate.
While the struggle continues tirelessly in the sovereignty space between Junts and Esquerra, who already trust that Puigdemont and Marta Rovira can return to Catalonia this year – “if a judge prevents it, I would be prevaricating,” warned Jordi Turull, who also announced a new heading towards self-determination – Alberto Núñez Feijóo once again raised his complaint on the European stage, despite the fact that the amnesty is now based on the draft report issued last Friday by the Venice Commission, the advisory body of the Council of Europe.
“Today, a European government is going to leave very serious crimes against the heart of the EU unpunished,” Feijóo warned from Bucharest, before the congress of the European People’s Party that re-elected Ursula von der Leyen as its candidate to lead the community Executive after the elections. European elections that, in Spain, will be held on June 6.
And the general secretary of the PP, Cuca Gamarra, aligned the amnesty with the Koldo case, in her fierce opposition strategy, to criticize that Sánchez is engaging in “an exercise of political corruption to stay in power.”
The Minister of the Presidency and Justice, Félix Bolaños, instead celebrated the Amnesty law as “a brave step, which ends a decade of tension, confrontation and conflict.” The final shelving of the process. “A decade in which no one won and we all lost, a decade of collective failure in which Catalonia stood still,” he highlighted. “And we are opening a stage of dialogue and agreements, where politics will be made within the institutions and the Constitution,” stressed Bolaños, one of the main drafters of the law, who has already warned that “it is going to become a reference.” world, in accordance with the best European standards.” “It is a fully European and fully constitutional law,” the minister congratulated himself.
Bolaños even expressed the PSOE’s pride in its achievement, despite the fact that it is not shared by everyone in the socialist ranks. “I’m sorry to disagree, but today is not a day in which, as a socialist, I feel especially proud,” said the leader of the PSOE of Aragon, Javier Lambán. The Castilian-La Mancha Emiliano García-Page thinks the same.
The minister assumed that this controversial norm arouses rejection in broad political and social sectors, even among the socialist ranks. “It is a law that will surely be better understood in a few years, when it is proven that it has been useful,” Bolaños argued. Just as happened, in the last legislature, with the pardons.
In this “new stage of agreements”, in any case, Bolaños prioritized new public accounts for this year. “There will be an agreement on budgets, there is an unequivocal will from all the groups that support the Government to have budgets,” he highlighted.
Although the text of the law had already been agreed upon by the three parties the day before, and endorsed by all the partners of the investiture early in the day, the Justice commission was more than a mere procedure. At least that’s what PP and Vox proposed, who, separately, tried to hinder its development.
The PP requested a postponement to be able to study the content of an agreement that Cuca Gamarra called “extra-parliamentary concocted outside the borders” of Spain. And so the commission table granted it. It was specifically 28 minutes. A parenthesis after which the votes of PSOE and Sumar dictated the resumption. Not without messages, such as that of the purple deputy Martina Velarde, who reproached the popular ones that “what bothers them is not the amnesty”, like those that the PP promoted, and approved, in the last 40 years, “but who ”.
Vox insisted on its recurring comparison of the Amnesty law with a “coup d’état”, although Javier Ortega Smith’s staging declined due to its null plot basis.
During the respective shifts there were more reproaches. Some were even sarcastic, like when Jon Iñarritu (Bildu) demanded less fuss from the representatives of the PP, when the report of the Venice Commission, favorable to the law, had caught them with the “ice cream cart” as it ended up being contrary to their interests. Without forgetting what ERC and Junts dedicated themselves to, to claim a greater share in achieving the agreed amendments.
Despite the tug-of-war, the commission followed less tense channels and was far from the tone of enormous tension that prevails in this incipient legislature. A specific drop in revolutions that the formations favorable to the amnesty agreed to attribute to the “own goal” that the opinion of the Venice Commission represents for the internationalization of the cause sought by the PP, whose deputies chose to save their strength to concentrate them on the Koldo case, to which they give greater scope in their strategy of attrition to the PSOE.