The Republican group proposes to EH-Bildu and Unidas We can recover the 36 agreed amendments to the Gag Law – which on Tuesday declined in the presentation of the Interior Commission precisely because of the vote of Esquerra and Bildu – and add to them the four issues in which there was no agreement (rubber balls, hot returns, authority of the agent and disobedience) to turn them into a bill and register it in Congress.
The idea is that the initiative be promoted by the three parliamentary groups and be processed as a bill, although the Republican group itself admits that it is very difficult to give time to complete the process before the dissolution of the Parliament. According to the republican group, the idea is advanced with the abertzale formation, although it has not yet been agreed with the confederal group of Unidas Podemos, En Comú, En Marea, among other reasons because in the group of the minority partner of the government there is a clear division around this reform, explain ERC sources, who describe these internal tensions as “bad news”.
Sources from the confederal group, however, receive with skepticism this attempt by Esquerra to return to the moment before Tuesday’s vote, which condemned the reform of the Gag law, on the one hand, because the haste of deadlines make the initiative a mere gesture of voluntarism, and on the other, because they understand that it responds to the attempt of the Republicans to mitigate the political cost of having put an end to the reform process with their vote.
In ERC, on the other hand, they understand that it was the PSOE that forced a vote on the paper in the Interior commission to put pressure on the groups that aspired to reach agreements on what they considered “red lines” of the modification of the law: the ban rubber balls and end hot returns.
The fact is that already in November 2022, sources from the negotiation of the law indicated that there was a sufficient block of agreed reforms and that, given the immobility of the PSOE with the four points that in the end have blown up the norm, it was advisable to accelerate the presentation to save those almost forty agreements and prevent the vote from being contaminated, as it has finally been, by the imminent municipal and regional elections.
