“The Central Government does not stop”, warned Minister Félix Bolaños presenting the legislative agenda of the Executive for 2024 approved by the Council of Ministers.
The advance of the Catalan elections to May 12, in the midst of an intense electoral calendar – with the Basque elections on April 21 and the European elections on June 9 – forced Pedro Sánchez to renounce the general State budgets for to this year, since it cannot have the essential support of ERC and Junts, already focused on the 12-M contest. Therefore, the electoral calendar has left the current legislature in abeyance, waiting for the polls to settle the new ones balances of power in the political scene.
But with the pretense of resuming the initiative in the middle of the war without an open truce with the PP over the corruption scandals, and to try to avoid an image of legislative paralysis and parliamentary weakness, without the support to add majorities being guaranteed, the The Council of Ministers approved yesterday the normative action plan for 2024, which includes almost 50 new laws.
“It is a realistic and ambitious plan”, assured Bolaños. And in Moncloa they trust that this avalanche of almost half a hundred bills for the current year “should have a very important consensus” in the Courts.
The profile of this regulatory agenda, with laws of a social nature, to modernize public administration and improve employment conditions, to extend rights or to support young people, would therefore aim to avoid internal dissensions in the coalition between the PSOE and Sumar, as well as re-aligning the parliamentary majority of Sánchez’s investiture, which includes left-wing formations, such as Esquerra, EH Bildu, Podem or the BNG, and others with a more conservative tendency, such as Junts , the PNB or Canary Coalition.
“The Government renews its commitment to a progressive legislative agenda”, highlighted Bolaños, outlining the up to 198 legislative initiatives incorporated in this new regulatory plan, to be approved by 2024. These are, as he listed, six organic laws, 43 ordinary laws and 149 royal decrees.
The minister highlighted the planned laws for industry, cinema, youth, transformation of the public administration, against the trafficking and exploitation of human beings or the reform of the law of Criminal Justice (Lecrim).
Bolaños, however, avoided advancing whether this latest legal reform will include a reduction in the terms of judicial instruction, as the Spanish Government offered Junts in the course of the negotiation to unblock the processing of the Amnesty law in Congress.
To finalize this rule, he alleged, the Executive wants to wait to know the mandatory report requested, three years ago, from the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ). Bolaños regretted that the governing body of judges rushed to issue reports on the controversial Amnesty law, which were not mandatory, and that, instead, it took three years to establish a position on the reform of Lecrim.
Yesterday, the Council of Ministers also approved the challenge before the Constitutional Court (TC) of the agreement of the Bureau of the Parliament to process a proposal of law, arising from a popular legislative initiative, to declare the independence of Catalonia. The Central Government asked the appeal to suspend the processing of the initiative, which will imply its immediate standstill.
Bolaños justified the decision to combat the “isolationism” of Catalonia. “This resource protects the Constitution and the institutions of Catalonia”, he assured. And he warned that the Statute and the Catalan self-government are regulated by rules that this independence initiative, in his opinion, would “overturn”. The Executive and the PSOE, he remarked, “under no circumstances are they betting on the independence and isolation of Catalonia with regard to Spain and the rest of Europe”.
Nor do they accept a referendum on self-determination, which Bolaños included among the “formulas of the past that led to collective failures and generated tension, conflict and confrontation.” As much as Junts and ERC ask for it in the face of 12-M.
